Rare, hard to come by, but now available on the Internet Archive: the complete book set for the Windows CE Developer’s Kit from 1999. It contains all the separate books in their full glory, so if you ever wanted to write either a Windows CE application or driver for Windows CE 2.0, here’s all the information you’ll ever need.
The Microsoft Windows CE Developer’s Kit provides all the information you need to write applications for devices based on the Microsofte Windowso CE operating system.
The Microsoft Windows CE Programmer’s Guide details the architecture of the operating system, how to write applications, how to implement synchronisation with a PC, and much more that pertains to developing applications. The Microsoft Windows CE User Interface Services Guide can be seen as an important addition to the Programmer’s Guide, as it details everything related to creating a GUI and how to handle various input methods.
Going a few steps deeper, and we arrive at the Microsoft Windows CE Communications Guide, which, as the name implies, tells you all you need to know about infrared connections, telephony, networking and internet connections, and related matter. Finally, we arrive at the Microsoft Windows CE Device Driver Kit, which, as the name implies, is for those of us interested in writing device drivers for Windows CE, something that will surely be of great importance in the future, since Windows CE is sure to dominate our mobile life.
To get started, you do need to have Microsoft Visual C++ version 6.0 and the Microsoft Windows CE Toolkit for Visual C++ version 6.0 up and running, since all code samples in the Programmer’s Guide are developed with it, but I’m sure you already have this taken care of – why would you be developing for any other platforms, am I right?
Just as a note here.
It had became very hard for me to get Windows CE software on the last 6 years. I got a car radio with Windows CE and I think there should be some crazy people with some software around to tweak their car radio… but I guess that crazy people were gone like 15 years go 🙂
I’m not a developer, but I have tried to gather some WinCE related public source code here:
– https://github.com/orgs/WinCEsoft/repositories
Any links to more WinCE Car Radio related software are welcome.
CE is just a de-bloated regular Windows, programming it is just WinAPI all over again, so you just need people crazy enough to code for that dumpster fire. Compiling would be pain, though, especially for some obscure chip as MIPS.
I coded on Windows CE 5 or 6 back in 2005-2007 (embedded Visual C++ 3 and 4) and the “experience” wasn’t that bad at all, there was a MFC equivalent which made coding almost a breeze. And cross debugging for the IDE was kinda effective. There was even 7″ netbooks with CE 6 or 7 around 2010, when the EeePC came out.
I’d agree it wasn’t bad as dev experience. I wasn’t a fan of the OS on pocket pc devices. Lots of crashes, slow downs. Many apps had memory leaks, users had trouble figuring out how to restart aps.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
I never owned anything running windows ce, but assuming it was similar to building any other win32 software I might have liked developing for it because I could “hit the ground running” so to speak.
I wish “android linux” and “desktop linux” were more compatible. I felt a bit cheated because my native linux skills didn’t carry over to android, haha.
Alfman, Yes it was very nice to develop for, we took some libraries we had written for a Motorola 68k, Some other libraries we had written for windows 98/2k and just seamlessly built an app around them. So much easier than it was to make something for the palm OS. It was essentially the same code base as the windows version. So we could tell clients: Ok you can either buy a laptop, or a pocket pc device, then go to our website and download the right binary for it. Click here for windows laptop, here if your using a windows ce device on arm ( see model listings) or here if using windows ce on mips (see listing). Support had to sometimes help them choose the right binary and install it. And sometimes clients were ticked off because they bought the cheapest, slowest device, and running the software took an hour per run, that took a windows laptop 5 minutes. And as mentioned the devices froze or became un responsive. No easy way to shut down apps natively. We added a kill me button to the interface and appropriately threaded the app, so they could restart the either the app or the device in the case that one or the other froze.
But the dev experience was top notch. Much better than anything else we worked with outside of normal windows.
From 1999? Is it Y2K compliant? *rim shot*
Finally we can develop Windows CE Dreamcast games!
I’m surprised Thomas never picked this up: https://archive.org/details/beia-release the BeIA dev kit.