Kind regards, Sebastien G. Monday, May 21, PM. Hi ANoop, If wan target a C. Net Compact Framework application using VS Regards, Anoop. Any recommandation for me to begin? To further explain, I want to build a simple application on Windows CE 5. You have the ability to specify the device drivers to be included, which parts of the API to include, as well as applications and application support files to include.
You also specify the settings in the system registry when a device is first turned on. One nice feature of Platform Builder is the ability to spin a custom SDK to support the efforts of application developers working with your version of the platform.
The eMbedded Visual Tools 3. It rolls into a single package all the support that used to require four separate products. Instead, it provides all that you need from both environments in a single, standalone package. Inside this package, you access each of the four programming interfaces that I discussed earlier in this article. Figure 3 eMbedded Visual Basic 3. But when you start running the tools, you'll see a lot that is familiar.
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.
Both environments feature familiar editors, menus, and settings windows. Developers who are used to the dozen or so project types in Visual Basic 6. I have used all of these tools at one time or another. 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. 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.
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. 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 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.
If you've written Visual Basic-based programs for the desktop using any version of Visual Basic, you'll be happy to find that you can use your knowledge to build applications for Windows CE. At the same time, Windows CE was built to run on small devices.
For this reason, the Visual Basic team created a significantly scaled-down version of Visual Basic. Perhaps the most important point to be made is that eMbedded Visual Basic does not contain a compiler. The eMbedded Visual Basic environment does not create an. EXE file, but rather a. VB file that contains a tokenized version of your program. Just like on the desktop, eMbedded Visual Basic lets you call into any available dynamic link library using the Declare statement.
For example, here is the declaration for calling the Win32 MessageBox function:. A friend on the Visual Basic team told me that strings are pointers to pointers in Visual Basic. It logically follows that ByVal causes a pointer to be passed, and ByRef passes a pointer to a pointer. To call the function declared a moment ago, use a statement like the following:.
You might have noticed that the name of the function has an extra W on it. That's because Windows CE only supports Unicode characters. This convention allows support for two different character sets to peacefully coexist. Windows CE inherits this oddity of Win32, and you'll need to remember it anytime you call a Win32 function that takes a character string.
Functions that don't take a character string MessageBeep, for example stay unchanged. Unfortunately, the Visual Basic runtime doesn't support the Type statement, which means you cannot define your own structures. This is problematic because it means you cannot directly call any DLL function that requires a pointer to a structure. That environment provides a built-in wizard that makes it pretty quick to create a DLL. It also has a flag that identifies whether the element being held is a short or long integer, a short or long floating point number, or a string to name just a few.
The chief benefit of supporting a single data type is simplicity. Internally, all parameters to all functions are all the same, as is the type returned by functions. Purists won't like this at all, since it represents a tax of percent for the 2-byte value and a tax of percent for the 4-byte value.
Among other things, avoid making arrays much larger than what you actually need. The ReDim statement is supported in the Visual Basic runtime to help you resize arrays as you need to. Yes, arrays are supported in the Visual Basic runtime. However, I don't see this as a huge problem. In general, I believe that developers of large applications will hide most complexity inside a DLL or in an ActiveX control. Most of the variables that you'll need will be used to manage both the user interface and the interactions between components.
Developers who have used the Api Text Viewer tool from the desktop will be happy to know that it can also be used with eMbedded Visual Basic. As mentioned earlier, it gets placed within the Start menu next to the other eMbedded Visual Tools. It provides function declarations, constants, and structure type information for calling Win32 functions from Visual Basic. Since eMbedded Visual Basic doesn't support user-defined types, only the function declarations and constants are useful.
A quick perusal of the definitions file showed that not all Win32 functions supported in Windows CE are present CreateWindow, for example, is missing.
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. Most of the code in this program handles the various menu selections. Application Builder for Windows Embedded Compact The process for creating a Windows Embedded Compact image has not been updated significantly. The general process for building an image is:. The primary change is in the selection of the correct BSP and additional considerations for the CE image.
This guide assumes you are already familiar with the process to build a Windows CE system image, but it is worth looking more deeply at the changed section. Step 2 is the only part of the previous OS Design project process that is changed when using the CE App Container, see below for additional details.
After doing this, you will have the ability to configure the options and sub-projects just like you would normally do for a Windows Embedded Compact image. The section below only provides additional actions to execute at certain stages of the IoT Core image building process. Unlike the process of building a Windows Embedded Compact image, Windows 10 IoT Core decouples yet integrates the creation of firmware, board support packages, image definition, and application inclusion. By utilizing different technologies for these pieces, you can separate the work you need to do amongst different teams or individuals in your organization.
Create a workspace. Create your product definition. Add features and applications to your product. Deploy the FFU to the device and test. Finalize and sign your retail FFU. While some of these steps are like the process of using Platform Builder PB to create a device image, it is worth exploring some areas more deeply.
Radar Radar 1 1 gold badge 3 3 silver badges 11 11 bronze badges. I have read in different articles that I need to be in an NT environment. Is this true or do can I create programs from XP Pro? XP is just NT with a pretty face, a few more features, and a few bugs fixed along the way. CE came out around the same time as NT, so a lot of the early articles will refer to it that way. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Shaihi Shaihi 3, 4 4 gold badges 24 24 silver badges 47 47 bronze badges.
VS and dont support CE? Found this on Google: download. Thanks Shaihi for this link. I've spent 2 hours searching it!
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