Detect windows mobile device

Question

Excuse the newbness of this, I'm not getting very far relying on google and intuition alone :S.

I need to add the facility to a windows application, I have already developed, to detect the presence of a windows mobile device (win CE 5.0) and then copy a specific file to that device and copy a different file from that device back to the connected computer.

I've never done anything with windows mobile before and searching isn't helping much as most results relate to developing apps to go ON to mobile devices as opposed to interacting with.

a) My development environment is win2008, vs2008 (most of my work is web dev so this is a close match for hosted apps), I can't seem to install winCE emulator (any version). Do i need to change platform or are there alternatives/workarounds?

b) Are there any libraries open source or otherwise to ease working with mobile devices?

c) Are there any useful resources for getting started with interacting with windows mobile devices from .net apps?

Thanks

Answer 1

Will your device be docked? If yes, then you can use OpenNetCF RAPI to detect it and copy files to and from it.

Regarding your questions:

a) To run the emulator you need to install an SDK like this one. That is the latest Windows Mobile SDK. SDKs for older versions as well for generic Windows CE devices are available. You can install all of them together.

For b) and c) have a look at OpenNetCF Smart Device Framework.