Hello.
I'm working on a project where a program running on the mobile phone needs to communicate with a program running on the PC it's connected to. Ideally, I'd like to use USB, WiFi, whatever to communicate.
The two programs should be able to communicate things like battery life, text messages, etc... But I can work on that later, I just need to get them to talk.
What's the best way to do this?
You might try looking into the OpeNETCF.Desktop.Communications library. You can start at http://www.opennetcf.com/FreeSoftware/tabid/84/Default.aspx and follow the links to find the necessary downloads. (I think you may need to get it from their subversion repository).
"Best" is really subjective and highly dependent on a lot of factors like devices, topology, firewall presence, need for security, etc, etc.
Where do you need the comms to originate and will you have an ActiveSync connection? If the PC initiates the comms and you have ActiveSync, then RAPI is the transport you'd use as it's got all of the infrastructure done and ready.
For anything else you're going to need some form of proprietary protocol and transport mechanism. Typically I write a simple socket protocol with a defined message structure (typically a message ID, CRC, message length and data payload). I then have some base message class that handles the comms and a set of derived messages for each specific command I want. For 2-way stuff that requires a response, I typically create a base Response class and then derive specific response formats from it.
Assuming you have a wifi connection, one way for your Windows Mobile program to communicate with your PC would be to use WCF on the .NET compact framework 3.5.
You'd create a new WCF application to run you your PC, and expose an interface exposing functions you want to call from your Windows Mobile Device.
WCF on Windows Mobile requires Compact Framework 3.5 to be installed on your device. You also need the "Windows Mobile power toys" to be able to generate compatible proxies to call from Windows mobile.
Power Toys for .NET Compact Framework 3.5
Calling the WCF service from your WM Device also requires you to manually set up the binding and endpoint to pass into your web service proxy (with desktop WCF this is done automatically by loading them from a config file).
WCF on Windows Mobile currently only supports the basic http binding (which can be encrypted if you want), but this may be enough for your needs.