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The Windows XP Embedded Command-Line Tool
2006-10-11 Article Rating:  / 0
Foreword: This whitepaper, second in our series leading up to the Nov. 1 official launch of Windows XP Embedded SP2 Feature Pack 2007, discusses the newly redesigned command line scripting tool, offering some history and a couple of examples where it is particularly useful.
In 2002, Windows XP Embedded Service Pack 1 shipped a command-line tool called CMI Explorer. This tool was a simple value-add script that provided some of the functionality also available in Target Designer and Component Database Manager. The original version of this tool was challenging to use and poorly documented; and it didn't provide a lot of value to our customers. Overall, our customers challenged us to update the tool to better automate their build processes and perform various tasks with it. This interest in a command-line tool (and particularly scripting capability) remained high. When I took over development of CMI Explorer in January 2006, I set out to understand the most common customer scenarios and requests for our tools. The most common request was, by far, a way to automate Target Designer; particularly to be able to make small changes to a configuration and build it without having to manually work with the graphical user interface (GUI) every time. Other customers wanted a way to efficiently import their custom components without having to use Component Database Manager, and many requested the ability to trace component dependency relationships (something none of our existing tools provided directly). After several months of research and development, we released a new version of this tool, simply called "Windows XP Embedded Command-Line Tool," or XPECMD for short. XPECMD enables many developer scenarios and can greatly improve a developer's productivity -- among its top features:
In XPECMD, however, you need just a few commands to perform the same task. For example, say you want to add a new User Account to your configuration. You can leverage XPECMD's powerful Single-Quote Expression (SQE) syntax to add a new component instance to your configuration, and the whole process can be done in just a few easy steps:
This code can run in as little as 10-15 seconds, depending on the complexity of your runtime. To make it even more convenient, you can write this into a response file and set it up so it can take parameters for the config and runtime image paths. Then you can easily automate the process across multiple files, running them all as a batch in a fraction of the time it would take to do all this in TD. Another useful feature of XPECMD is the ability to trace component dependencies both directions. Using the DEPTREE and SHOW commands, you can easily see a component's dependencies - DEPTREE also allows you to see an entire tree of component dependencies if you so desire. Meanwhile, the DEPTRACE command allows you to see which components depend on a specific component. As an example, let's look at the forward and reverse dependencies of Enhanced Write Filter:
XPECMD has many other ways to improve your productivity, but as I showed in the few examples above, this utility should enable XP Embedded developers to be more productive, more easily search for information in their configurations or in the database, and finally, incorporate the XPe build process into existing build environments. Be sure to check out the new tool (included in the Tools Update of Feature Pack 2007 CTP) and the "How To" document available on the Microsoft Connect site. You can find more information about the Windows XPe product at its homepage on MSDN. You can also download a Community Technology Preview version of FP 2007 from the Microsoft Connect Site -- sign up for the CTP using this Invitation ID: 123-BC7M-6GVK. Copyright (c) 2006 Microsoft Corp. All rights reserved. Reproduced by WindowsForDevices.com with permission.  About the author: Matt Kellner is a test engineer on the Windows Embedded team who describes himself as a "jack-of-all-trades," providing various testing services and developing tools for several different groups within the team. Matt has been using and programming computers since he was a kid and says he is "passionate about the quality of my work."
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