Professional Windows® Embedded CE 6.0

Chapter 10. Application Development

Using the same VS2005 IDE environment to develop managed-code and native-code applications, the application development environment for Windows Embedded CE is quite similar to desktop Windows. Developers with previous experience, who are developing applications for the desktop version of Windows using VS2005, can adapt their knowledge quickly to learning and developing CE applications.

This chapter provides a general overview of the application development environment available in CE.

Although CE is designed from the ground up in a completely different way from desktop Windows, there are a lot of similarities between the two environments. In general, there are two categories of CE applications, native-code and managed-code applications. Just like the desktop version of Windows, a developer can use the VS2005 IDE to develop native-code applications using Visual C++, and managed-code applications using Visual Basic or C#.

Depending on the target device's business scope, required functions, and features, the development process may need to focus on meeting one or more of the following objectives:

• Real-time

• Small footprint

• Existing code base reuse or porting

• Application binary that can be portable across multiple hardware platforms

• Application source code that can be portable across multiple hardware platforms

To meet one or more of the above objectives, the application developer may need to develop the solution using managed code, native code, or a combination ...