CE 6.0: Don't add Platform Manager to your OSDesign

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Adding the Platform Manager component to a CE 6.0 operating system design will generate build errors for a platform - the error will read something like:

Error: Could not find file 'C:\WINCE600\OSDesigns\<Release Dir Path>\cemgrc.exe' on disk

The image below shows the Platform Manager component in the CE 6.0 catalog (more information on Platform Manager can be found in this MSDN Article) 

Take a look at the contents of C:\WINCE600\PUBLIC\COMMON\CESYSGEN\makefile - line 1187, "Platman Stuff" - this tries to copy files from $(OTHERS_ROOT)\platman\target\$(_TGTCPU)\ - this resolves (for a default install) to C:\WINCE600\OTHERS\platman\ (etc...) - the Platman folder doesn't exist in the CE 6.0 install, so the files cannot be copied and therefore the build fails. For the RTM build Platform Manager should have been removed from the catalog, the underlying files were removed from the \WINCE600 folder structure but the catalog item was somehow overlooked.

With the introduction of CE 6.0 the underlying connection betweeen Visual Studio 2005 and your embedded target is CoreCon, to deploy and debug an application you need to start two processes on your target device, these are known as ConManClient2.exe and CmAccept.exe - these can be found in the following folder on your desktop development machine C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\CoreCon\1.0\Target\wce400\<Processor_Type> - with previous releases of CE you would use Visual Studio 2003 or eMbedded Visual C++ 4.0 SP4 to write applications, Visual Studio would require you to run a desktop application (the Smart Device Authentication Utilitiy) which would run two applications on your target device (ConmanClient.exe and SDAuthUtilDevice.exe) - note that Visual Studio doesn't need Platform Builder attached to the target to run this application - for eMbedded Visual C++ you have two options to deploy an application, the first is to "piggy back" on the existing Platform Builder connection to the device (using CESH/KITL as the connection from eMbedded Visual C++), the second option is to deploy the appliation using TCP/IP and running applications directly on the target like CEMGRC which uses an interesting command line!

With the release of CE 6.0 native and managed application development is merged into one tool, Visual Studio 2005 - now you just need to run the ConManClient2 and CmAccept utilities on the device (how you get them there is another story) and then you can write, deploy, and debug your managed or native applications - which means that Platform Manager isn't needed any more and therefore shouldn't be added to your platform (note that ActiveSync doesn't need Platform Manager to work).

- Mike