CE 5 compatibility issues

Most HPCFactor users are familiar with CE 3 or CE 4.x. There are not so many user reports concerning CE5 devices. However, I saw several contributions concerning CE5 compatibility issues: some applications that ran fine with CE 4 don't seem to work with CE 5. I have no CE 5 device but I may buy one in the future, so I'd like to know "how bad the situation really is": do PPC apps work with the usual Dlls? what about regular CE 3 / CE.net apps ?

the only issue i know of is the fileopen dialog for execheck. what else did you hear about?

It seems to have trouble with very common programs like Total Commander and others:
look at this post from Michelbel:
http://www.hpcfactor.com/forums/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=6434&posts=137&mid=109187#M109187

Also I heard that it may be difficult to run PPC programs. Any experienced CE 5 users ?

my dot 340 also cannot run totalcommander out of the box even though it has cenet 4.2. this depends on coredll, not on the OS. i know for a fact that totalcommander will run on some ce 5.0 devices out of the box (such as the hp ipaq 316)

(coredl2.dll of course solves this on the dot 340)

Edited by cmonex 2007-12-26 9:23 AM

Yeah, Total Commander not running has nothing to do with OS version. Its just because some function it needs from coredll.dll is missing from some CE 5.0 core devices. I recently got my first CE 5.0 device a few weeks ago (Mio C320) and sadly had this issue myself. Cmonex is correct. You do need to make it use a different coredll but it also causes some issues like it not being able to display icons in the file browser. Though, I'm sure it runs on most CE 5.0 Professional and other more complete CE core OS images just the same as 4.2. If you are not getting a CE 5.0 PNA, I'm sure you have less to worry about with this.

Now, regarding ExecutabilityCheck (and some other apps like Pocket RAR) and their FileOpen dialogs appearing and disappearing abruptly...
I think this has more to do with OS implementation/missing shell registry entries in many CE core devices than anything else. I've at least gotten ExecutabilityCheck to display its file dialog now by passing a directory (\) on its command line so I hope this is the case. (My Mio is missing many things like the My Device, Recycle Bin, etc CLSIDs) Too bad ExecutabilityCheck is next to worthless on CE 5.0 for checking what an app imports.

Also, in CE 5.0 the FileOpen dialogs are more integrated with the shell and seem to be implemented more like the platform releases (Handheld PC/Pocket PC) where the filedialog resources are stored in ceshell.dll and will not be usable if a shell if not running unlike previous embedded Windows CE OS versions where FileOpen dialogs were within coredll.dll itself. If no ceshell is present on your device, you will not see file dialogs at all but thankfully the shell does not need to actually be running to use them in CE 5.0.

Hope this helps. :-)

Edited by TFGBD 2007-12-27 2:52 PM