Professional Windows® Embedded CE 6.0

Chapter 14. Autolaunch Applications

A Windows Embedded CE device is generally designed to perform certain designated functions, and it launches one or more applications to perform these functions during start-up.

Different methods are used to automatically launch an application when CE starts. Some applications require certain OS resources to be ready before launching. Some applications need to be launched with command-line parameters. For some CE devices, more than one application needs to be launched in sequence when CE starts.

In this chapter, we'll go through the following methods to autolaunch an application when CE starts:

• Configure the registry to automatically launch the application when CE starts.

• Autolaunch an application using the Windows\Startup registry.

• Develop a utility to launch the application when CE starts.

Autolaunch with the Registry

In this section, we'll work through an exercise to configure the registry to automatically launch an application when CE starts. We'll use the AutoCoreCon OS design project from Chapter 13 exercise, you need to work through it now before continuing.

In Chapter 13, we did the following:

• Added the autolaunch.exe utility to MyEmulatorBSP.

• Created the AutoCoreCon OS design project.

• Created the PBNativeApp native-code application project to generate the pbnativeapp.exe application.

• Built the AutoCoreCon OS design project to generate the CE runtime image.

For the exercise in this section, we will exclude the autolaunch.exe utility from the OS runtime ...