Event Handling

Hi,
I am totally new to winCE. I have to develop a programme for event handlig. Luckily, Microsoft VC++.net provides me with readymade functions for this like __event,__hook,__unhook__raise. But i have to port this programme on a portable device which runs on WinCE OS. My doubt is, will the programme written in VC++.net be run successfully on WinCE OS. If no, what other OS does this support. or What other event handling mechanism is supported by WinCE OS.

Thanks.
Mohan.

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Welcome to the board

All windows programs are basically event handling programs - the majority of time is spent waiting for an event on the queue.

There is a .net compact framework available for Windows CE 4 and 5, but not for previous versions to my knowledge.

What is it you're trying to develop exactly?

Hi,
Thanks for ur reply. i will explain in detail what i need. I am developing a client/server based application. my server is an iris camera and it has WinCE as its operatin system. and my application (gui) will be runing on a remote machine(client). now i need to communicate and control the camera through the client. i also need to do event handling, for example, any change in value of the registry is an event occurred in the server which has to be intimated to the client side. so i decided to use vc++.net as i said in my first mail. But will the commands of vc++.net be supported in the winCE operating system. so after reading a detailed reply, i hope u can answer my mail more related.
Thanks a lot.

Thanks for clarifying that

Is it one of the Matrox Smart IRIS cameras, which run WinCE.net? If so, you should be looking at using the .net compact framework to develop your WinCE-side code, although be aware that information about the compact framework seems quite thin on the ground...

You could develop the server-side natively, or you could use remote tools which would be my preference: There is a full remote API provided by WindowsCE/ActiveSync, which allows you to monitor the registy and handle certain events that happen on WinCE on a connected PC.

There's a .net wrapper for this - CERapi on http://www.wintoolzone.com/showpage.aspx?url=dotnet.aspx

If there's anything specific we could help with, just shout. I've never used the .net compact framework personally though, I always stick to the WinCE native API so I won't be a huge amount of help.

You can use Visual Studio (and VC++.net) so long as you have all of the relevant Windows CE SDK's installed with it. You cannot program for Windows CE against the mainstream Windows .net SDK tools.
Presumably your Client system is mainstream Windows? on which you can use normal .net to create the interface program, all you need to do it work out a common communications layer between the two as per the OSI model. Using winsock over a Serial, CMDA, GSM, LAN, WIFI etc connection they should chat quite happily.

Mohan, welcome! First off, a few stats:

1. Is your client also displaying the image from the iris camera or just controlling it?
2. Is the server and client connected via some means of network?

If you just want some means to communicate between a remote and server app, you don't necessarily need to use VC++.Net. But its ok if you use. It just means that your device needs to support CF.NET whereas if you just write your app in VC++ using one of the embedded VC tools, you only need to write and use standard libraries and communicate.

There are a few ways to allow server-client comms:

1. Event based using winsock
A possible way to do the communication is to use winsock. This way, you don't necessarily need to use VC++.NET. On the server end, you write a server app to listen on a port (say 1033 or something larger than the standard ports). Then on the client side, you write a client app to send/recv data to the server at that port (1033). This defines the client<->server comm for the client to send/recv commands to the server, ie control the server, receive status updates from the server.

2. Polling using HTTP calls
Another way is to setup a simple web server on the camera side and have an ASP/ASPX page to process incoming commands and to return status updates. The client side can be just a couple of web pages or a client app that makes HTTP calls to this ASP/ASPX page to either send commands or retrieve status updates and update its UI with the new status.

You can also use php or jsp on the server side if you want.

it is available for CE3 too.. if it's not in the ROM, it can be installed of course it's made for ppc's only, but will happily install on a hpc device too..