If you install the recent CE 5.0 QFE's AND try to build Kerberos.dll, you will run into a bug that unfortunately was introduced in this QFE. Check out customer thread alerting us to it here . Short summary is that customer is seeing: "Warning: Unable to do imports from kerberos.dll to NETAPI32...

I just checked out the blog and realized it's been ~1.5 months since the last post, which is lame. I have a dilemna since I've run out of tricks/advice that I think are useful, for now at least. I can either write nothing or do something random, like put up a picture of my dog, Daisy. It never would...

If you try to build svsutil.hxx on certain versions of the Windows Mobile SDK, you may run into build errors. I know it's on WM5 SDK at a minimum, I don't know about WM6 SDK. The error you'll see will complain about the methods int operator==(int iBit) and int operator==(SVSBitField &bf) in the...

I recently wrote about the recent DCOM Remoting Addon pack being available . Since I'm running out of things to write about, I'll explain the geeky details of how the DCOM addon pack came to be. This post is for the very bored only or those who are intrigued by the Windows CE Build Process. There...

As I wrote here , in Windows CE 6.0 we removed DCOM remoting - that is the ability to create and host COM objects across a network. We did this due to security. Our DCOM is built on NT4 vintage code and there was no way we could patch up our implementation to meet security requirements. The desktop faced...

My "stuff to blog about" well has pretty much run dry, as anyone who follows this blog knows. Fortunately there's always a customer running into something that I've never thought about something to inspire me. Bad for the poor customer hitting the issue, but good for the rest of us. A customer wasn...

Background A number of customers on a recent WM6 versions have run into a problem where GPSGetPosition returns ERROR_INVALID_PARAMETER always, even on apps that worked fine in the past. The newsgroup thread is here . The device I've reproed and tested on was an HTC P3300, but based on newsgroup thread...

Sometimes on the newsgroups I tell an OEM that's having problems with some component to "Drop DEBUG DLL foo into the release directory and turn on full DEBUGOUT and get me the output." Most Windows CE components have pretty good debug-time logging so a lot of times a customer can see the exact cause...

Windows CE does not support the time.h structures, as I blog about here . Fortunately Chris Tacke at OpenNETCF has created a free library to do this, which is available here , in order to make porting easier to CE. (If you're not porting code you should be using the Win32 time functions, which WinCE...

MEDC is the Mobile and Embedded DevCon. The US version will by May 1-3 this year in Las Vegas. I thought about trying to sell it some in this blog, but the official site does a much better job. I went to one of these back in '04 (it had a different name then). I got a lot out of it getting to interact...

Because I've been leading off a bunch of my more recent posts on obscure subjects with "Well, probably only 5 people care about this..." I'm afraid only 5 people are reading the blog now. I hope not because this post is important. If you're a Platform Builder customer you need to manually change some...

Suppose that you get a username and a password and you want to see whether it is legitimate. The telnet server as an example of this – you give it a username & password that it needs to check before letting you party on CE. It’s possible to do the check by some calls into the SSPI layer, but these...

This post is another of the pretty low-level, under the hood about interprocess communication on WinCE. I considered not even posting it, but it meets my geek threshold (5 people in the world will need it sooner or later, but probably not more than 5) so I'm going ahead. One of the main functions...

Recently I've been asked some questions about how GPSID handles certain weird scenarios that fall outside the scope of the docs. I'm happy to answer these of course - it is my job after all :). The really hard questions have come from GPS device driver writers, but this post may help app developers also...

This is one of those blogs where I hesitated to post it because it may be going too hard core into the guts of CE. But from dealing with our customers who use our shared source and some of the really hard core questions I get, I'm hoping there are at least 5 super-geeks who can benefit from this. ...

I mention here that the information about the GPSID poll driver is now included in WinCE 6. If you are an OEM implementing a GPS driver on CE6 and you're not natively spitting out NMEA but would have to generate NMEA only for GPSID to parse, I'd highly recommend that you check out this information. ...

Suppose you have some service in services(d).exe on your CE device that is so critical that you don't anyone ever unloading it. This would be a paranoid play, since most users never mess around with loading and unloading services directly. But say that your service is doing something so critical to say...

At some basic level, Windows CE's GPSID and Location Framework are doing the same thing. They're giving you the position of your device. I've had people ask me if with Location Framework if we were going to retire/deprecate/etc... GPSID. No. First, Location Framework depends on GPSID in order to...

In CE 6.0, one of the things we changed was naming services.exe to be servicesd.exe. I mentioned it at the end of my CE6 services.exe initial post as to why we did this. Services.exe in CE6 is just a simple command line wrapper that lets you do things like "services stop HTP0:"; no longer does it do...

By default, whenever you use BSTRs OLE will keep the memory cached in order to aid performance. There are scenarios where you may want to disable this. First would be if you're on a device with not a lot of memory and don't want it being spent in the cache. Another is when you're debugging into a memory...

The new name for Windows CE is Windows Embedded CE 6.0. Some of the marketing guys are unhappy when I call it only "Windows CE", never mind WinCE or just CE. Though I really really doubt any of you would be confused or care, I'll call out officially that all these are the same thing. Only the MBA who...

As I hinted at here , in CE 6.0 we have removed DCOM remoting due to security concerns. This is only the remoting portion. There has been some confusion on this so I want to make it clear what this means. You can still do interprocess communication on the same device if you include SYSGEN_DCOM in your...

Thanks to Seattle getting snowed in and MS borderline shutting down and me not having an emulator image built yet, this will be my first ever two blog in one day. OK, enough soon to be dated blog chattiness. Down to business. Suppose you're writing an application that calls into a service in servicesd...

When rewriting services.exe for the CE 6.0 kernel , we tried to make it so that as few changes as possible were required for service writers. Unlike application BC (which is critical), there were some places in services.exe where your service may need to be reworked for the new kernel. Some of these...

We're very committed on CE to creating a great development platform for location aware applications. The first piece of this was GPSID, introduced in WM5 and now in general embedded for CE 6.0. In CE 6.0, I'm pleased to announce we've added another, more generic abstraction layer for retrieving location...