Windows CE Programming

Screen layout changes from Windows Mobile 6.1 to Windows Mobile Embedded Handheld 6.5

The Windows Mobile screen geometry changed from Windows Mobile 6.1 and before to the actual Windows Mobile 6.5 (also called Windows Embedded Handheld). Not only the geometry changed, the layout also changed. The Start icon is now moved to the bottom whereas before WM65 the start icon was on the left in the taskbar.

The taskbar and the menubar was about 26 pixels in height. With WM65 the taskbar is about 18 pixels in height and the menu bar occupies 34 pixels in height.

You can see that assuming a fixed client size will give problems with the layout of the application, especially if menubar and taskbar height are assumed as being 26 pixels all the time.

Applications that only use the client size with the taskbar and menubar visible, will show normally, as the resulting client size does not differ between WM61 and WM65.

Continue reading ‘Windows Mobile 6.5: Changed Screen Geometry’ »

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Just a short note: rdesktop-ce is now RDP5 capable and can connect to Win2008 R2 Terminal Services.

With the help of bradh I now have a Windows CE fork of rdesktop that does not show modulo 0×108 error any more when run against windows 2008 R2 server.

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In the first part of this series I showed how to make your compact framework application full screen or remove the Start icon from the menu bar. Now we will take a look at the task bar.

The task bar is at the top of your screen (except for fullscreen applications) and shows valuable information like the connection status, battery status or the current time.

Not full screen, taskbar not locked

This is a kiosk mode risk. The user is able to click the symbols in the taskbar and gets a popup menu with some icons. These icons enable the user to change connection settings, power management settings and others. You propably do not want to allow the user to make changes to some or all of the possible changes.

For example, clicking on the phone or signal strength icon will bring up this dialog:

The user can then change connection settings and activate or deactivate radios. Possibly a source for a bunch of support calls, if the user accidently changes connection settings.

Continue reading ‘Windows Mobile: Kiosk Mode Series, part 2’ »

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Hello

I would like to start a series of articles of how you can lockdown your application user in your application. How can you achieve a kiosk mode application, where the user is only allowed to do what you define.

The first article is about the Windows Start and Done Icon in menu bar and about fullscreen. You may already know, how to hide the start and done icon permanently from a Windows Embedded Handheld (Windows Mobile 6.5.3) device: Link

But there is also a temporary way using the same approach. The trick is to change the registry keys, that make the OS believe you have hardware buttons for Start and Done, BEFORE you show your CSharp form.

Before Windows Embedded Handheld (WEH, or Windows Mobile 6.5.3), you are able to use SHFullScreen API calls. But this will not work with WEH. Neither the flags SHFS_HIDESIPBUTTON nor SHFS_HIDESTARTICON will work. The LockDown.cs class also includes code for that and you may test the functions with the Test-Application.

The class I am talking about is called LockDown. There is also a Test-Application (OEMTitleBarHandler, dont ask me about the name selection) to test all functions I will describe.

Continue reading ‘Windows Mobile: Kiosk Mode Series, part 1’ »

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