CoreCon4CE and Autolaunch4CE, 2 catalog components for Windows Embedded CE and Compact

  • Article

When developing an application for Windows Embedded CE 6.0 or Windows Embedded Compact 7, you need to establish a connection between your target and your development environment (Visual Studio). To establish the connection and exchange information with the dev tools, Windows Embedded CE 6.0 and Windows Embedded Compact 7 leverage a feature called Core Connectivity (CoreCon). Usually you would have Core Connectivity binaries downloaded and started automatically by the tools through a connection pre-established like ActiveSync. But if you don’t have ActiveSync in your OS image, then you need to download the right binaries on the target and start CoreCon manually… worst: if you have to reboot your image between two debug sessions, you have to redo the whole process.

So developers often set their image to include the corecon components (copied from the Visual Studio smart device development files) and automatically start the connectivity at boot time.

To facilitate this setup, the embedded101.com gurus have released a couple of great powertoy on codeplex that support both Windows Embedded CE 6.0 and Windows Embedded Compact 7 and multiple CPUs.

  • CoreCon4CE: this Catalog component that adds the right Corecon binaries to your OSDesign.
  • AutoLaunch4CE: this Catalog component allows to automatically launch the application of your choice.