Feed: lowlevel
Post-URL: http://www.lowlevel.cz/log/pivot/entry.php?id=230
First of all I have to say Thank you to [HPC factor][1] site. This one is a
great and more or less the only island for anybody seeking to get anything
around "old" Handheld PCs. (Just a note for "old": the devices like Jornada
720 are not beaten by any modern piece of hardware).
[1]: http://www.hpcfactor.com/
You may think that developing for **WinCE HPC 2000** has to be easy as this
is/was supported by a big company. However there is no official force to
support that old platform when there is a new one that is pushed like ever
needed innovation. Even searching machines are giving no relevant results
for direct questions on wince. You are only able to find pages propagating
new versions like windows mobile or phone or whatever. Most of the links to
Microsoft pages are redirected to e-shops or error pages saying "You are
not welcomed."
The noise is also coming from the naming of various platforms. The names
are changing like a wind. It starts with few versions of WinCE, then comes
WinCE .NET. Various platforms of that days hold names like PocketPC,
Handheld PC, Handheld PC 2000, Palm PC etc.
Getting first track is not that easy but you may find that **you need MS
Embedded Visual Tools. For HPC2000 you need original version 3.0** (not
version 2002) cca. 300MB archive expanding to 800MB of install disks. While
this presents itself like a complete development environment with SDK, it
does not have **HPC2000 SDK, you need to download it separately** (60MB).
Funny part comes with installation itself. MSEVT requires at least 128MB of
RAM and W98 to W2k. It runs on WXP but **does not work on PC with 4GB of
RAM**. Install fails with "Not enought memory". You have to either find
some old PC or start virtual machine, but then you may expect problems with
direct access to your HPC.
After few attempts to install the tools you end up with either Visual Basic
or Visual C++ IDE. Essential is you want to run you application and debug
it on you HPC. If you compile or debug, then MSEVT says it is connecting to
device, e.g. thru **Windows CE service** but is either connecting forever
or fails with "check Windows CE service running". Looking thru net for such
a think is mostly useless as this is also dead technology. This kind of
service was **replaced with MS Active Sync**. Well, the development
environment requires desktop user application Active Sync to work. When you
start AS it of course tries to sync your HPC in various ways with your dev
PC. Not that ideal.
The next adventure beside connecting AS with your HPC is to connect from
IDE to AS. While IDE says it is starting the AS automatically in reality it
does not. **You have to start it manually while IDE "starts" it.** I've
spend several hours trying to figure out HOW to connect the IDE thru AS to
device.. I had few promising attempts but finally gave up. I had exactly
one successful debug session I am not able to reproduce. I am able to
transfer some of DLLs, but most often IDE just sits there "starting Active
sync" a bails out. There are not logs, no way how to find what\s going on.
This is as usually with windows. It is either working at first few attempts
(trial and error) or there is no way to get it running.
URL: http://www.lowlevel.cz/log/pivot/entry.php?id=230
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