Where to place your custom CE 6 catalog files ?

The Windows Embedded CE 6.0 product typically installs to the \Wince600 folder, and has a number of sub-folders Public, Private, Platform etc…

You may be working on an operating system project that uses an existing BSP, some of the CE 6.0 catalog features, and perhaps some sub-projects that are integrated into your operating system design. I quite often also want to add some pre-built applications (perhaps NETCF), or stand-alone resource files (bitmaps, audio files etc…), or just have a dummy project that allows me to quickly add some registry information to the o/s without changing any of the existing components. So where should you place these dummy projects?

The Platform Builder catalog is built on the fly by walking a set of folders (platform, public etc…) – if you install a new BSP, or add a new 3rd party component you can refresh the catalog within Platform Builder (button to the left of the Catalog Search edit control).

So, let’s say I want to build a dummy project, I would typically create a new folder under \Wince600\public\MyComponent and add a sub-folder called “Catalog” which is where I would drop the pbcxml file (Platform Builder Catalog XML) file. Public seems like a good place to drop the files since my dummy project isn’t platform specific, it’s not private source, so why not Public? – I’ve created perhaps 20 or so projects to host ConnectionManager, applications, registry settings, and support files – Ideally, I’d like to place the files somewhere else that doesn’t interfere with the existing “Public” content. It turns out that you can create a folder here… \Wince600\3rdparty and have your custom projects hosted under this folder – so my new dummy folder location is \Wince600\3rdparty\MyComponent\Catalog (and this is where the .pbcxml file lives).

Now that I know this works for CE6 I will update CEFileWiz so you can drop your components in the 3rdParty folder – look out for another post soon…

- Mike