Windows CE Emulation

The Microsoft® Windows® CE emulation environment provides a Microsoft® Windows® NT desktop version of Windows CE. Emulation provides support for Windows CE common controls and the Windows CE object store file system.

The object store is managed by a file called FILESYS.EXE and contains the Windows CE registry, databases, and other files. The tree structure is identical to the tree structure of the object store on the remote device, and all semantics are the same. Most of the Windows CE functionality is retained, including desktop shortcuts, object store browsing, drag-and-drop operations, context-sensitive menus, and support for all shell APIs.

To run emulation on your desktop PC, you must first have Microsoft® Windows NT® 4.0, Microsoft® Visual C++® 5.0, and the Microsoft® Windows® CE Toolkit for Visual C++® 5.0 installed.

To start emulation, start FILESYS.EXE indirectly by clicking Desktop HPC Emulation on the Windows CE Platform SDK submenu. You can also start emulation by clicking EXPLOREM.EXE, a file located by default in Program Files\Windows CE Platform SDK\wce\emul\hpc\windows. FILESYS.EXE runs as a background task, so you will not see anything to indicate that it is running.

The following topics are explained in this section.

Starting Emulation

Closing Emulation

The Windows CE Command Bar

Building Applications for Emulation

Running Applications Under Emulation

Changing the Size of the Emulation Window

Troubleshooting Emulation