It's no secret to regulars here that I still like toying with older CE devices and older CE apps, and one of the hardest-to-find examples is the class of apps written for the first incarnation of Visual Basic for CE
(specifically CE 2.0
). Using the file extension .pvb
(as opposed to the the .vb of CE 2.1 and beyond
), it appears that only two developers wrote such apps: Vincent Collura
(of CE Beans fame
) and some guy named Larry Roof.
(Several other developers wrote VB programs they claimed were compatible with CE 2.0 - and a view of the OS identifiers in the files shows them as CE 2.0 - but they use the file extension .vb rather than .pvb, and they don't work on the CE 2.0 device once installed.
)
The VB runtime package on this site for CE 2.0 includes a total of four files: pvb.exe
(in 2.11 and later this was replaced by pvbload.exe
), pvbrt.dll, vbscript.dll, and vbsen.dll. However, I noticed that the .pvb apps developed by Larry Roof included what appear to be CE 2.0 versions of object control DLLs
(MSCEComDlg.dll and MSCEFile.dll
), as well as another DLL I haven't seen before: VBCEMiscUtil.dll. Where did these DLLs come from, and why aren't they included in our runtime download package for CE 2.0?
