Install and Configure Windows 10 Insider Preview on Raspberry Pi 2 (opens in new tab)

This is awesome news.

I legitimately don't understand why Microsoft didn't do this years ago with their Windows Embedded line (e.g. XP embedded, Vista embedded, etc) like you see on ATMs.

I looked into this way back when XP embedded was the latest, and there was a lot of interest but it was "impossible" to licence legitimately (it was for hardware manufacturers only, no tinkerers).

Even many "Live CDs" around that time had technically "illegal" versions of Windows embedded running, that Microsoft never cracked down on (I guess because they were only used for recovery and diagnostics). It is also why Linux "Live CDs" (DVDs/USB sticks) has now become the defacto: All of the same toys but with none of the legal question marks.

As as I said, awesome news. Better late than never I guess. Something really "right" is going on at Microsoft.

Seems like a brilliant move on Microsofts' part, I don't really know many other toolsets for these platforms that is as "integrated", although I guess the standard still yet to be beaten by Microsoft is to be using the thing itself for its own development - i.e. fully-hosted onboard .. which is not what is happening here, I suppose? i.e. the IDE is on the 'real PC', and we just have a remote connection to the rPi for testing/running the bundle .. which is great, in and of itself, but its still not quite a full-blown "here is a full cross-platform build of Visual Studio for rPi2, which builds fat bins for all platform packages ..": which would be even greater, imnsho, as a long-time eschewer of all things Microsoft'ian, whose interest is being tweaked by this intrusion into what is, typically, a Linux-dominated domain. (Methinks it curious to see Microsoft competing so aggressively for this space..)

Microsoft has gone all out for this - there's even SSH! The banner (?) is SSH-2.0-MS_1.000. Password is the same as whatever you have set for the web interface/powershell. Disable your keys to reduce the delay in logon as it doesn't seem to understand public keys at all.

Does anyone know if you can write the SD card using dd/Win32DiskImager?

Edit: yes - https://github.com/t0x0/random/wiki/ffu2img