Palm OS Programming, 2nd Edition

Using Desktop APIs

Along with other things, the Conduit Development Kit provides three DLLs that provide functionality for desktop code. The three DLLs are used for:

• Registering and unregistering conduits

• Starting and stopping a HotSync

• Retrieving a list of Palm users and installing applications for any of those users

First, we’ll look at the most common APIs from each of those DLLs, along with short samples of how to use them. Next, we’ll talk about a complicated wrinkle involving finding the correct DLL at runtime. This complication requires slight changes to the samples. Finally, we’ll discuss some of the most important issues involved in writing an installer for a conduit and/or Palm OS application.

Registering/Unregistering Conduit Manager APIs

A small command-line program (ConduitInstall.exe) is going to install and register our conduit. We use a separate program (ConduitDeinstall.exe) to uninstall it.

Installing the conduit

As ConduitInstall.exe executes, it makes calls to the Conduit Manager API to register our conduit. It needs to register the three required entries of the conduit (Conduit, Creator, and Directory) and any of the optional entries we want to set.

Tip

We are using ConduitInstall.exe—a simple command-line program—to avoid clouding the relevant issues with a lot of technical details concerning Windows application programming. A number of installation methods are available; we couldn’t possibly cover them all. Here are just two possibilities: you could write ...