Quote:
Originally Posted by pphilipp
Am I missing something or does the A81 NOT come with Outlook or any other contact/address application?
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I've been digging deeper into CE land and need to backup, take a deep breath, and stick with compact framework and a little native interop, and actually write myself some more useable apps. I've been rolling my own little htmlish biblereader, and working on a few games to learn about the differences in the old Pocket PC OS and plain ole raw, but light years newer version of CE.
I've been down many rabbit holes of basic chunks of tech..trying not to have to rewrite it myself (c# wrapper for webkit for a better html viewer, RTF display controls, gdiplus, gradients, etc) POOM was a big one on my list..Pocket Outlook Object Model.
I've been violating the spirit and temporarily the letter of license agreements left and right with Platform Builder, every SDK and Rom Extractor I can, and have played around with various combinations of pimstore.dll, pimres.dll, pimutil.dll, even poutlook.exe I scarfed from somewhere just to see if I could get it to run.
If I had been able to figure out the right combination of legal dll files to work on the Wits build of CE, or write the implementation myself if I had to, then I was going to forgo the poutlook.exe for legal and ethical reasons and code my own front end.
I just wanted to attempt to get all the functions legally going there and put an interface so ActiveSync would shove things in the DBs on the device and then my app would use them just like Outlook would.
I think I've determined that it would be quicker and much more legal from a platform builder perspective to just use RAPI, and write my own. I figure, if I used Compact Framework 3.5 to quickly write a Windows CE 6 version of an e-mail/contact manager, then I would just build a desktop "syncher" that talked to various version of the real Outlook Object Model on the desktop, then synched with my homegrown app databases on the tablet.
Aggravating, but then it would be customizeable and fill a missing niche, apparently. I just want it to synch with my main Outlook on the desktop, I don't care if it's Outlook or homebrew on the tablet itself. Surely if I hunt around, I can find some open source e-mail/contact management type system I could just do a Win CE C# port of so I didn't have to write from scratch and could contribute it back as a port. (I may not find such a beast as a starting point since everyone is obsessed with html mail instead of real store and forward apps anymore.)
Oh well, it's been interesting, plenty of research black holes. For example, on all the PIM dlls and such, I've been using Dependency Walker on the desktop searching against the Wits SDK and a generic Arm emu OS I built with Platform Builder, trying to find out why some of these mix and match dlls don't work.
So for a couple of hours yesterday, and today at lunch at work, I decided I needed to plumb dependencies right on the tablet so I could see exactly what Wits dlls are compatible with as far as exported functions and dependencies. You can't copy them out of rom to put on the desktop for the regular dependency walker to interrogate.
I just figured nobody had cared enough to write a dependency walker that ran on a CE device, so I looked into that. I finally determined that it was the ROM issue that was the deadend. I couldn't read the PE headers from coredll.dll since it was marked by windows as a rom module. So then that lead to digging into the platform builder to see how the os itself extracts file images from rom, stitches them back together, decompresses them, etc. My C++ is just too too rusty to get into that, even though the pieces are there in the actual OS code.