Chapter 15: Connecting to the Desktop - Programming Microsoft Windows Ce Net 3Rd [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Chapter 15: Connecting to the Desktop

Overview

One of the major market segments that Windows CE is designed for is desktop companions. In answer to the requirements of this market, two product categories created using Windows CE are desktop companions: the Handheld PC and the Pocket PC. A third, the Smartphone, also leverages its link to the PC. Each of these products requires a strong and highly functional link between the Windows CE device and the desktop PC running Windows.

Given this absolute necessity for good desktop connectivity, it's not surprising that Windows CE has a vast array of functions that enable applications on the desktop and the remote Windows CE device to communicate with one another. In general, most of this desktop-to-device processing takes place on the desktop. This is logical because the desktop PC has much greater processing power and more storage space than the less powerful and much smaller Windows CE system.

All of the helper DLLs, communications support, and viewer programs are collected in the ActiveSync product. When a user buys any of the horizontal platforms, such as the Pocket PC or the Handheld PC, a CD loaded with ActiveSync comes with the device. The user becomes accustomed to seeing the Mobile Devices folder that, once ActiveSync is installed, appears on his desktop. But there's much more to ActiveSync than Mobile Devices. A number of DLLs are included, for example, to help the Windows CE application developer write PC-based applications that can work with the remote Windows CE device.

In this chapter, I'll cover the various APIs that provide the desktop–to–Windows CE link. These include the remote API, or RAPI, that allows applications running on the desktop to directly invoke functions on the remote Windows CE system. I'll also look at methods a PC application can use to notify itself when a connection exists between a PC and a Windows CE device.

In a departure from the other chapters in this book, almost all the examples in this chapter are PC-based Windows programs. They're written to work for all 32-bit versions of Windows. I take the same approach with the PC-based examples as I do for the CE-based examples, writing to the API instead of using a class library such as MFC. The principles shown here could easily be used by MFC-based applications or by a managed application using the .NET runtime environment.