Windows CE software can be installed on a Handheld PC in one of three different ways. This article briefly discusses the three different methods that a user may encounter when downloading and attempting to install software on their device.
Windows CE 1.0 Desktop Software Download Pc
Download: https://urllio.com/2vGsgc
Regardless of whether you download a software application or are provided with it on CD-ROM or floppy disk. The software will come 'packaged' in one of three ways. It is important to understand the differences between the different delivery types. Failure to do so may result in error messages such as
NB: Please check to see of your operating system is compatible with the ActiveSync software by checking the Compatibility table.For Windows CE 2.0 and above based Handheld PC desktop software please see ActiveSync 3.8.
f you are just jumping into the world of Windows CE, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised with what you find. Microsoft has been growing and nurturing this compact version of Windowsâ"and the tools needed to develop software for itâ"since Windows CE 1.0 hit the streets in 1996. Today, there are hundreds of different types of devices that are powered by Windows CE. The most widely known include the Pocket PC and the Handheld PC (HPC). But many other devices are built on Windows CE. In the home entertainment arena, TV set-top boxes and the Sega Dreamcast use Windows CE. In the industrial automation arena, there are programmable logic controllers and other factory-floor devices built on Windows CE. Mobile data collection devices, cell phones, bar code readers, automatic teller machines, and digital cameras can be added to the list of Windows CE-based devices to name just a few. If you're new to software development for Windows CE, your watchword is choice. You have a broad range of tools to choose from for developing Windows CE-based applications. You can write to the Win32 API using C or C++ for the smallest and fastest code. If you are looking for a C++ class framework, you can use the MFC library. For creating ActiveX controls and components, ATL is also supported. If you're a fan of Visual BasicÂ, you can build Visual Basic-based applications targeted for Windows CE using eMbedded Visual Basicâ"a cross between browser-based VBScript and Visual Basic for the desktop. And there are more tool choices to come. In the future, as the Microsoft .NET initiative starts shipping, a C# compiler for Windows CE is scheduled, along with a .NET Framework runtime library for Windows CE. It's already pretty good, and it's just going to get better. The goal of this article is to describe what Windows CE can do, and to help you select development tools. For readers who are new to Windows CE, this article starts with a developer-oriented description of Windows CE with particular emphasis on the exact subset of Win32 that is supported on Windows CE 3.0. The second part of the article reviews existing development tools for Windows CE, along with a discussion of their relative strengths and weaknesses. I have also created two sample applications: a text editor called VBEdit written in eMbedded Visual Basic, and one called EDITOR for Win32. (The source code for each is available from the link at the top of this article.) Studying the two samples should provide a taste for what is involved in developing for Windows CE.
This is your first clue that while the names and the packaging of the development tools for Windows CE have changed, what you find inside is very familiar. A brief perusal of the eMbedded Visual Basic menus shows that a few things are missing from Visual Studio, but that the majority of core functionality remains. eMbedded Visual C++ is practically a clone of Visual C++ 6.0; you'll have to look very hard to find the few places where the two are not the same. Both environments feature familiar editors, menus, and settings windows. Both offer a starting point for building apps, although in this arena the eMbedded Visual C++ environment offers the richer collection. Its wizards let you create Win32 and MFC applications, and it also supports the creation of ATL components. When you create a new eMbedded Visual Basic-based project, you get to choose between four project types: a formless project (good for headless Windows CE-based systems), a Palm-size project, a Pocket PC project, and a Handheld PC Pro (HPC Pro) project. Developers who are used to the dozen or so project types in Visual Basic 6.0 will no doubt miss the lack of flexibility, but I assume that more project types will appear in future releases. Both eMbedded Visual Basic and eMbedded Visual C++ support a set of remote tools, which are described in Figure 5. To use these tools, a Windows CE-based device must be connected to a development workstationâ"either by a serial or USB cable or through a network. I have used all of these tools at one time or another. I've found the Remote Registry Editor to be particularly useful when working with COM and ActiveX controls. I use the File Viewer to copy files onto or from a Windows CE-based device (although you don't use this tool for executable files, since this is automatically done for you as part of the build process). Sometimes I find that I need to use the Process Viewer to kill a process that isn't responding. Spy and Zoom behave the same as their desktop counterparts, so they don't need further introduction here. A key part of both eMbedded Visual Basic and eMbedded Visual C++ is support for downloading and debugging applications. While it might not seem obvious to Windows CE newbies, a key issue for developers using Windows CE is getting new programs loaded onto an actual device and then being able to debug on that device. This is supported pretty well, and you can download either via a serial line or using a network. Of the two, the preferred method is to download and debug over a network. The key issue here is speed. Especially when stepping through code, it's painful to have to wait several seconds for the debugger command to be shipped to the device, executed, and then shipped back. To postpone this pain, eMbedded Visual Tools includes the Windows CE emulator. There is an emulator for each type of device running Windows CE. Running your Windows CE-based programs on the emulator gives you a chance to fine-tune it during the early stages of your development project. The emulators can run on Windows NTÂ 4.0 or Windows 2000, but are not able to run on Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows Me (due to lack of Unicode support). Figure 6 shows my sample application, VBEdit, running in the emulator for the Pocket PC. Each target device needs its own emulator, so when you develop for Windows CE you discover there is one emulator for the HPC, another one for the HPC Pro, yet a third for the Palm-size PC, and still another one for Pocket PC. Of course, you'll still need to test and debug all software on all available devices. The reason is simple: the emulators don't provide 100 percent of the same behaviors that you find on an actual device. This is due to the fact that the emulators come from a different code base, instead of having a common code base with the emulated device. While overall emulation is quite good, the few differences mean that you can't rely on it for final testing.
VBEdit is an application that I wrote using eMbedded Visual Basic 3.0 (see Figure 6). Assuming that you are familiar with Visual Basic, the first application you write for Windows CE will probably take a bit more effort than would be required on the desktop. That was certainly the case for me when I wrote VBEdit. Part of the extra work was due to the fact that fewer features are present in eMbedded Visual Basic than I had anticipated. Another commonly overlooked fact is that it simply takes longer to build on one computer and then run on another. The downloading of the application takes time, as does the downloading of all the sundry support files (like the Visual Basic runtime and the supporting ActiveX controls). Even if things have been downloaded once, a check is done every time to make sure that things are as they need to be. VBEdit lets you create and edit Unicode text files. The user interface is just a simple edit controlâ"or textbox, in the terminology of Visual Basicâ"that does most of the real work of dealing with the text. Most of the code in this program handles the various menu selections. I incorporated three ActiveX controls that were part of the standard set that ships with a common dialog control, a file system control, and the Pocket PC menu control. When I was finished designing my program, I ran the Application Install Wizard, which packaged up everything that would be needed to ship my program. Figure 7 lists and describes the files that were included. The code that I wrote had gotten parsed and tokenized, so that my original source code isn't available for you to read (unless you want to go to the trouble of reverse-engineering this file). My program by itself was a mere 8KB. As written, my program required another 290KB of ActiveX controls. It is reasonable, I think, to regard this as overhead for my program, since these controls are not installed on a typical Pocket PC. The final set of files make up the Visual Basic runtime, and are present in ROM on a typical Pocket PC device. This 557KB image is listed here as part of the total cost to run my program, although you'll have to determine whether these are in ROM on the device you are targeting. If not, they'll need to be installed to the object store of the target device. Object store compression will ease this cost somewhat because of the 2x compression that you get for free.
When Microsoft introduced the first Windows operating system back in 1985, it was an environment designed to be easy to use. However, it was not necessarily an environment for which it was easy to write code. For this reasonâ"to help programmers be productiveâ"Microsoft created the MFC library. MFC provides an object-oriented encapsulation of the Windows API that can be accessed from C++. It provides a framework that hides a lot of the fussiness of the Win32 API. At the same time, it introduces its own particular type of complexity, which can make it somewhat hard to learn. To a certain extent, this is compensated for by all the helper utilities that are availableâ"in the form of various wizardsâ"that organize things like message handling, COM, ActiveX handling, and Automation. There are also a slew of helper classesâ"such as the CString string class, to name just oneâ"which tremendously simplifies the handling of otherwise complex tasks. One issue with MFC programming in Windows CE has to do with the size of the runtime library. On the Pocket PC platform, mfcce300.dll varies in size from 276KB (on x86 processor based units) to 506KB (on the Power PC processor-based units). This becomes something of a nonissue on platforms where the redistributable is in ROM, of course, which is the case on devices such as the Pocket PC and the HPC Pro. A second issue is that there are multiple versions of the MFC library. This is, in fact, one of the sources of DLL Hellâ"the problems caused by proliferations of libraries with similar but slightly different services in a set of libraries that all have the same name. On the HPC Pro Edition of Windows CE, the name of the MFC library is mfcce211.dll. This is not an unsolvable problem, but it is a complication that requires time and energy on the part of any software's test and deployment teams. Failing to address this issue early only passes the problem on to the support and training groups. I have found that, at some point, the issue of whether to use Win32 or MFC comes down to thinking about your existing code base and the experience of your development (and support) staff. In general, I have heard good reports from MFC programmers who have made the move from programming for Windows for the desktop to programming MFC for Windows CE. As always, your mileage may vary. 2ff7e9595c
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