Core Connectivity Services (Windows Embedded CE 6.0)
1/5/2010
eXDI2 relies on the Core Connectivity, a technology that provides connectivity between a desktop workstation and a target device through a set of running services. For example, to support hardware-assisted debugging, the Platform Builder system debugger uses both an eXDI service and an OsAccess service. The eXDI service is a probe driver that provides OS-agnostic, mostly hardware information and the OSAccess service provides OS-specific awareness.
Core Connectivity allows eXDI to group all host-side services associated with a target. This provides the following advantages:
- Easy discovery
- Shared property database
- Low-overhead for in-process calls between services
Core Connectivity provides a common service interface, ICcService that handles common service support tasks such as initialization, locking, and unlocking, establishing connection, and disconnecting. The Core Connectivity service host interface, ICcSvcHost, manages service instances so that services continue to run even if the client application terminates abnormally. This API co-creates the service with a target device pointer, and returns an ICcService pointer to the client.
To implement a third-party eXDI driver as a service to support a probe or ICE, the user selects the name of driver from the debugger drop-down in the Target Device Connectivity Options Dialog Box. The driver is then implemented as a Core Connectivity service for this connection.
Each service belongs to a separate service category: the eXDI service belongs to the Kernel Debugger Probe Driver service category, and the OS access service belongs to the Kernel Debugger OS Awareness service category. The Target Device Connectivity Options dialog box also displays the core service categories for each connection. The Kernel Debugger Probe Driver and Kernel Debugger OS Awareness service categories are implemented by default, and cannot be selected during service configuration.
Core Connectivity manages the underlying data associated with connectivity objects through an XML-based datastore. Through the datastore, the connectivity infrastructure provides unique device identification, the bootable device GUID, as well as information about memory, associated services, and settings.