Monday 16 May 2005

Dammit, more incompatibilities

From Windows Mobile Platform Migration FAQ for Developers:

Starting with Windows Mobile 5.0, only one instance of the installer (wceload.exe) can be running at a time on Pocket PC devices. This restriction has always been in place on Smartphone. As a result, CAB files that start other CAB files from a custom setup DLL may not work on Windows Mobile 5.0. The workaround for this is to have a small executable in the CAB that a custom setup.dll starts in its Install_Exit entry point. This executable can get a handle to the running wceload.exe process, wait for wceload.exe to exit, and then restart wceload.exe on the additional CABs.

We have a pretty clever (says he who wrote it) technique of packing multiple CABs into one wrapper CAB file, which enables us to install Compact Framework, SQL CE, our barcode scanner hardware abstraction layer (ScanHAL), our simple large-key input method, and the application itself, all in one go. Looks like I’ll need to rewrite it slightly at the install-to-RAM stage.

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