Hi All,

I hope everyone is familier now with the basic OS development. So, lets start writing applications. This is the first blog in this section so I will take simple application from the book. "Hello World" is the simplest application to get started with application development in windows CE.

Step 1:

From VS2005 IDE select File/New/Project, to bring up the project screen.

Expand Other Languages tab then select and expand Visual C# expand Smart Device and select Windows CE 5.0 on the right hand side select Device Application, choose an appropriate name for the application and click OK.

Step 2:

Once the new application window is up you can modify the different parameters as per your choice.

Resize the Form to a smaller size (320x240) to make it easy to see the application when it runs on CE 6.0.

Change the Form caption to “CE 6.0 JumpStart Kit – C# Example”

Add a text-box to the form, change the name to textHelloWorld, clear the content in the text-box and place the text-box to the center of the form.

Add a button to the form, change the name to buttonHelloWorld, and change the text on the button’s caption to “Hello World” and place the button to the center of the from below the textHelloWorld text-box.

Add the following code to the “buttonHelloWorld_Click” event.textHelloWorld.Text = "Hello World.";

Step 3: Connecting the eBox with VS2005 for deploying the application.

To perform this portion of the exercise, CE 6.0 image configured and built during the previous sections of this guide must be downloaded and running on eBox-4300, and eBox4300_WinCE600_SDK must be installed.

Corecon components are used to connect eBox-4300 to Visual Studio 2005 development workstation.

The following 5 files need to be copied to \Windows\ folder on eBox-4300.

• Clientshutdown.exe

• ConmanClient2.exe

• CMaccept.exe

• eDbgTL.dll

• TcpConnectionA.dll

These files are stored at the following directory on the Visual Studio 2005 development workstation. “..\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\CoreCon\1.0\Target\wce400\..”

Corecon components supporting different CPU architectures are provided. There are folders, with names corresponding to the CPU, containing Corecon components for each CPU family. eBox-4300 is designed using an x86 CPU architecture. CoreCon components in the “..\x86” sub folder are used.

In the earlier blogs, during the customizing OS Design step, CoreCon component was added to the OS Design which in turn in included in the resulting CE 6.0 image.

To establish a connection between the eBox-4300 and the Visual Studio 2005 development station,from eBox-4300 desktop, with CE 6.0 running, click on Start | Run from CE 6.0 desktop with the cmd command to open a console command window.

From within the console command window, type s IpConfig to view the eBox’s assigned IP-address.

Step 4:

From VS2005 IDE, set the target device to “eBox4300_WinCE600_SDK x86 Device”

Step 5:

Select Tools | Options

• On the left, click to expand the “Device Tools” folder and select the “Devices” subfolder.

• On the right, select eBox4300_WinCE600_SDK from the list of available platform in the Show devices for platform combo text box.

• Click on the Properties button to bring up eBox4300_WinCE600 x86 Device Properties setting screen.

• Click on the Configure button to bring up Configure TCP/IP Transport.

• Select Use specific IP address and enter eBox-4300’s IP address.

• Click OK and to commit device IP address setting.

Step 5:

Connecting eBox to VS2005 workstation using Corecon use the following steps to launch ConmanClient2.exe and cMaccept.exe components from eBox4300.

• From the eBox desktop, with win CE 6.0 image created in the previous steps running, double click on My Device and open the Windows folder.

• From the Windows folder, double click on the ConmanClient.exe followed by double click on cMaccept.exe. to launch the CoreCon connection service.

• From VS2005 IDE, select Tools/Connect to device and select eBox4300_WinCE600_SDK (or whatever name you gave your SDK developed previously) and click connect button.

Step 6: Downloading the application to the eBox.

From the VS2005 IDE, select Debug/ Start Debugging to bring up the Deploy eBox4300_Demo screen.

Select your previously developed SDK and click Deploy. Once the download is complete you should see the Hello World screen on your CE desktop.

So, here we are all set with the first application. Next time I will write about another application from the book. I am only writing about the applications from the book because not everyone has the book.

Thanks for reading