.NET Compact Framework: CAB file configuration

Question

I have a Windows Mobile application that I send to my client as a CAB file and then he installs it to 20 mobile devices. This application communicates with web service and has config.ini file in the Program Files/app_name/ folder to store the web service url. The drawback of the current approach is that client can change WS url only after CAB is installed, so that if he installs it to 20 devices he need to change WS url 20 times. Can I instead send client 2 files: CAb file and config.ini file, so that during CAB setup it automatically copies the config.ini file to the application directory. In this case client can change the WS url only once and then setup application on all devices with the config.ini file changed? Does anybody know how to achieve this?

Answer 1

You can add a custom setup DLL to your CAB file to perform actions. This could conceivably read some other text file to do the configuration, but that extra file would have to be deployed along with the CAB and the CAB would have to either know or be able to determine that file's location. How it would do that would depend on how your install works (i.e. from a storage card, via ActiveSync, etc).