Sometimes, it\'s useful to be able to display the foreground layer of a bitmap by itself. In the following figure, notice how the rooster, penguin, and cockatoo appear to be drawn on the background of the viewport. In fact, each of these images is a rectangular bitmap. The entire bitmap is painted in the client area, but the background pixels of the bitmap are combined with the client area pixels \"transparently.\" Essentially, this makes the bitmap behave like a slide on an overhead projector: only the image is visible at the destination.
A Bit of Theory Windows CE, being a little brother of its desktop counterpart, now exposes most PC communications capabilities. In many cases, they are just a subset of desktop versions, but still may be quite useful. In this article, we will discuss Windows Networking API (WNet). Mobile applications may access a remote host\'s file system and other resources via WNet. Your program can establish and terminate network connections, retrieve configuration.
To my way of thinking, the second best thing about Windows CE is that it leverages the vast body of code and knowledge that reside in the Win32 development community. The best thing about CE, and the thing in which lies its true genius and our great opportunity, is that it integrates and extends Windows, the most popular decentralized computing model of our time. What we have in this technical partnership is something entirely new, and profoundly greater than the sum of its parts. CE devices are poised to become the eyes and ears, hands and feet, so to speak, of the existing infrastructure of \"in situ\" computing.
Web Services today have became a common technique. Windows CE-based devices, as usual, were several steps behind desktop systems. A couple of months ago, Microsoft finally re-released SP2 for CE.NET, promising significant performance improvements. Thus, recently mobile developers are also able to use most of Web Services\' cake. I have no intention to discuss the theory or concept of this technology here; you may freely find a lot of articles on the Web. Also, we won\'t touch Web Services or Visual Studio.NET basics. What we\'ll be focused on is what does it all mean in the case of Windows CE.
As the owner of a brand-spanking-new Windows CE PPC, I pressed the power button in a state of great anticipation. The screen brightened and my first reaction was..... \"Where is everything?\" This may seem a bit glib now, but I think most users ( and probably most software developers) are a little surprised by the absence of an \"Explorer\" style view of the Windows CE file system on the PPC devices. There\'s a good reason for this, of course: We don\'t have the extravagant amounts of archival acreage on a CE device that we do on the desktop, and so we need a storage model that takes this into account.
While most CE devices have some sort of \"keyboard\", these are often tiny and awkward. For obvious reasons, users prefer the stylus. The stylus-oriented interface is really a bonus for Windows CE programmers, because it allows us to dispense with a great deal of the housekeeping that goes with mouse and keyboard based user input on the desktop. Being a \"touch screen\" kind of device, the stylus eliminates the need for floating cursors, by inherently keeping track of insertion points, and the like.
One of the amazing capabilities of the Palm OS is its embedded database support. The DB Manager API allows fulfilling different operations to be done easily and effectively. Unlike Windows CE, where basic DB operations may totally confuse an unexperienced programmer, here you need to know just the database\'s name to start. In this article, we will try to highlight how to handle some basic operations with Palm OS databases.
As initially conceived, palmtop devices were nothing more than special purpose standalone computers—fun and intriguing, but of limited practical use, precisely because they were inherently and imperviously encapsulated. Windows CE\'s RAPI technology dramatically expands the palmtop computing metaphor, by integrating seamless connectivity with the larger Windows world. In effect, this allows CE devices to \"borrow\" the storage, processing power, and networking infrastructure of the Windows Desktop. These capabilities also transform the CE programming model. Being a good CE application designer is about more than knowing how to write native code for the CE side.
In our recent era of global communications, providing some e-mailing capabilities to an application is more than \"nice to have.\" Mobile applications are no exception here. WinCE e-mailing was available ages ago, since the first versions of WIndows CE were released. Since Pocket PC 2002, Microsoft has decided to change its working message store model and has introduced a new set of interfaces. eVC help proudly states:
This article is divided into two parts. In first part, I will explain details about Windows classes in ATL, and second part covers real world example of how to create windows and dialog boxes using ATL Windowing.
