Application Porting / Development in Windows CE

Application Porting / Development in Windows CE

Introduction

Rapid Application Development is the mantra of modern day programmers. They hesitate to learn newer programming languages and at the same time do not want to unlearn the things they have already learnt. To satisfy their needs, Microsoft has once again come up without committing any blunder with an Operating System called Windows CE. Windows CE unlike its counterparts is a lightweight OS specially designed from scratch to cater the needs of devices ranging from TV Set top boxes, H/PC, P/PC to GPS Receivers(Global Positioning System). Windows CE supports the familiar Win32 API thereby enabling application developers to develop applications quickly and easily.

This paper introduces essential information on application development in Windows CE as well as porting existing applications destined for other Windows OSs to Windows CE.

Developing Applicatioins For WINDOWS CE

Setting the scene

Windows CE is a true 32 bit operating system with features like multitasking and multithreading. It is also a highly customizable OS, in the sense it can be altered to suit the needs of a specific device. In short Windows CE hosts all the good features of a modern day OS while eliminating those features that are not necessary to it. Several tools are available in the market for developing applications for Windows CE. This includes the different add-on kits like VC++ for Windows CE, VB for Windows CE and VJ++ for Windows CE. These are called as add-on kits because they integrate with their respective existing development tools. For example the VC++ for Windows CE when installed integrates with the installed VC++ 5.0 development environment. In other words VC++ 5.0 is mandatory for this toolkit to work. Moreover all these development tools are only for the Windows NT (4.0) platform. To customize the Windows CE OS to suit the needs of a specific device, Microsoft Visual C++ embedded toolkit (also known a s the Microsoft Windows CE Platform builder) can be used. It is this tool that helps in developing an OS that is compact and will serve the specific purpose in hand.

The most widely used devices that primarily use Windows CE are the Handheld PCs (H/PC) and the Palmheld PCs (P/PC). In the rest of the article by target device I refer to either the H/PC or P/PC. Several types of H/PCs and P/PCs are available in the market today, most of them use HITACHI SH3 and MIPS R4000 microprocessors. There are H/PCs and P/PCs that support other processors too but Microsoft generally provides support for SH3 and MIPS only, except for X86 emulation. In order to assist the programmers, Microsoft has provided a Windows CE emulation environment for the Intel X86 processors which provides an emulated shell to develop applications for Windows CE. This eliminates to a good extent the need for a target device for developing applications for Windows CE. Windows CE emulation is almost an exact replica of the original one so that the application developers can develop and test their applications using the emulator before incorporating it on the actual target. All the above mentioned develop ment tools for Windows CE come with a set of handy utilities like remote process viewer, remote registry editor, remote spy, remote object store etc. These utilities assist the programmers during the development and debugging of their applications.

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