Where to start - writing plugin DLL

[Guest gcherian]

A friendly request to fellow programmers - where to look for resources to start writing code for a home screen plugin dll. Any help would be helpful....

Thanks,

George

[Guest tedp]

Not that I'm authority on it :?: but I would suggest these as good places to start:

General Smartphone development tutorial

Plugin Development

Microsoft Smartphone Newsgroup

For me, I've gotten the most traction out of the "homescreen" sample plugin that comes with the WM 2003 SDK. Read the readme that comes along with it. It gives you good advice on how to compile, move the application over and so on. The things that I've learned in the last week or so as I've started playing around go like this:

1. The eVC application will tell you that it has downloaded and registered your DLL. Don't believe it. You'll have to make a CAB file, copy it to the phone or phone emulator and install it yourself.

2. In the readme I mentioned, it will tell you to use CEStart.exe to install the CAB file you built. Nice idea but the executable doesn't exist. You can do one of two things to get it installed.

a. copy the CAB file to \Storage\temp and hit it with IE (e.g give it a URL of file:///temp/yourcab.cab)

b. copy the CAB file to \Storage\windows\Start Menu\Accessories. You can then access the CAB file through the start menu.

3. If you like to do smaller code, build and test cycles, get over it. The overhead of installing a dll, connecting to the simulator and debugging will kill you :evil:

4. MessageBox() is your friend in an environment where feedback can be hard to get.

5. Hard reset of the emulator is a frequent process (at least for me :lol: ) so that I can get it to properly release a DLL from memory.

6. I use the remote registry editor, remote process viewer and remote file viewer utilities from eVC a LOT. Check 'em out.

All this is also probably more appropriate for the Development forum :(

[Guest tedp]

Add this link to the list of important links to read. It has some excellent and not especially well publicized info about the life cycle of a plugin. Make sure you catch the transcript as well as reading the Powerpoint presentation.