A quick reply from a software engineer friend:
For programming these systems take a look at the ADA and SparkADA programming languages.
Furthermore the specifications of such systems might (will) be split across more than one team without direct contact and using different sets of tools, software and hardware.
Microsoft and the rest of the known manufacturers do not even come into the picture and don't produce software, hardware etc for these kinds of environments.
Also the IFE systems are completely separated from the avionics side of things. If the IFE crashes (they mostly run off-the-shelf systems based on Unix/Linux or Windows) then it doesn't matter.
If the avionics fail (and it really is quite hard to get an avionics system to fail) then failures are very much contained to specific parts of the system. Failure here doesn't necessarily imply failure of the whole system. There's also much emphasis on failure tolerance (ie: if one piece fails then there's a backup immediately available), voting systems etc. Also the tolerances for these systems are specified very tightly but implemented using extremely robust technologies.
A few good links to wikipedia will help:
Fault-tolerant system - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Avionics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Integrated Modular Avionics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Avionics software - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_(...mming_language)
Much reading there.
But if you're experience to computing is "Microsoft","Apple" and "Linux" then this area is way removed - you can forget everything about desktop computing.
fc101
E145 Drive