I spent most of the day further researching XP Embedded, specifically with respect to developing custom components.  As the software I’m working on is meant to run on embedded devices, it would be a good idea for us to provide an XPe component in addition to our regular installer.

For the moment, I accomplish this by having the component run the installer at first boot, but I’m hoping to come up with a more elegant solution in the next couple of days.

Component design is another aspect of XPe Tools that could use some work.  With most software for Windows being distributed in exe or msi form, I was suprised that there was no utility to build a component from one of those files.  Instead, the best way to accomplish that would be to use a third party tool, such as InCtrl5, that will monitor changes to the filesystem and registry during the installation of any given piece of software.

Another odd thing I noticed today is that the Target Designer seemed to be crashing on me every few minutes.  I just upgraded it to SP2, and I’m wondering if that’s the problem.