CE 6.0 on Vista - Update (LoadCEPC and Compact Framework deploy)
Yesterday I posted an overview of my experience running CE 6.0 on Vista Enterprise - since then I've got some more bits working.
CEPC Bootloader - I'm booting an x86 based device using the MS-DOS based LoadCEPC bootloader - on Vista the CE 6.0 tools see the "BOOTME" from the device but don't download an o/s image - eboot.bin was updated for CE 6.0 - thankfully I still have a Windows XP box in my office, so I used that to download an o/s image to my target device (the flash on the device is exposed as "\Hard Disk" - once the image booted I could then use the Remote File Viewer to drop the updated eboot.bin into the "\Hard Disk" folder - a reboot of the target started MS-DOS and then LoadCEPC - I've confirmed that I can now download o/s images from my Windows XP Pro box and from my all new Vista install.
Deploying a Compact Framework application to a running CE 6.0 o/s image - this wasn't working for me yesterday - my o/s image contained all of the underlying support components (wceload, compact framework dependencies, ipconfig, CoreCon files and I also added the HTTPD web server although this isn't a dependency of the compact framework) - I could connect from VS 2005 "App-Dev" to the target, compact framework, system_SR_enu.cab and the application were all getting deployed - wceload was failing to install the cab files - if you look closely at the command line in the VS 2005 "App-Dev" tool you will see that wceload is being launched with a "/noui" switch - so I couldn't see why this was failing - I rebuilt my o/s image to include the command line processor so I could run wceload in interractive mode - installing the cab files by hand to watch the device UI and also the Platform Builder Debugger - turns out that the version of CF being deployed was the wrong version - looking in the netcf cab file (netcfv2.wce.x86.cab in this location "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SmartDevices\SDK\CompactFramework\2.0\v2.0\windowsce\wce500\x86") the setup.xml file contained the following information.
<parm name="OSVersionMin" value="5.0" />
<parm name="OSVersionMax" value="5.999" />
Obviously the CE 6.0 operating system is running with a version number of "6.0" - so the cab files were failing to install on the target device. The fix to this issue is to Patch the development PC to update the Compact Framework bits to .NET Compact Framework 2.0 SP1 - the download for the patch CF 2.0 SP1 can be found here.
Here's how the updated OS Version information looks in the correct _setup.xml
<parm name="OSVersionMin" value="5.0" />
<parm name="OSVersionMax" value="6.999" />
Here's a shot of the VS 2005 "App Dev" tools running on Vista with a breakpoint hit, connected to a CE 6.0 o/s image booted from VS 2005/CE 6.0 running on an eBox-2300.
looks like most CE 6.0 development tasks are working quite well on Vista.
- Mike
