Off topic post - CE web server

[anbeyon]

Hi I am sorry for posting this hear but I'm not too sure where I should
post in order to get a response. You guys have helped me quite a bit
recently so I thought I'd try here first.

I am very much a newbie to CE et al and so I may be asking a stupid
question.

Is is possible for me to have my Windows CE based device serve web
pages via ethernet that allow me to configure my device. (Currently
using CE .NET (4.2) but will shortly be using CE5.0) Processor is
currently PXA255 but will be upgrading to PXA270 very soon.

The sort of thing I'm looking at is implementing is having the user
log onto a home page of some sort and then use the various controls
there to set the device up. My CE device controls and Amplifier so the
users would be adjusting things like Tone and Gain.

Is this possible ?
Where should I start to look ?
What technologies should I be investigating ? - XML, ASP etc.... ????
Are there any books etc.... I should read.

Again - sorry for posting here

Thanks in advance

Anbeyon

 

[Paul G. Tobey [eMVP]]

You can build that capability in with Platform Builder, yes. I'm not aware
of any after-market server/page things that you could add to an
already-built device. For the custom items that you're talking about,
which, obviously, aren't part of the default configuration pages that
Microsoft ships, you'd have to do something in addition to just adding the
right components to the OS. The right place to look for people who have
done this before is microsoft.public.windowsce.platbuilder. Search the
archives of that group, maybe for "management web server" or something, and
ask, if you can't, with reasonable effort, find something about extending
the device management capabilities of the Web server.

Paul T.

 

[TDC]

Is this a headless device? I'd understand what you are rtying to do if
it was done by a helpdesk for a user, but if the user is doing it
himself, can't he just access those setting on the device itself?

Tom

 

[Guest]

You can use web server on WinCE that supports some basic ASP:

http://blogs.msdn.com/cenet/archive/2004/11/18/265864.aspx

 

[anbeyon]

Thanks for the replies

Regarding the headless comment - yes one of the models is to be
headless. Also we need to be able to (from a confoguration point of
view) communicate with more than one at a time.

Thanks

Anbeyon

 

[Joseph Byrns]

Would it not be easier to use Socket comms to communicate with the CE
devices and a separate Server/PC acting as the webserver which opens the
sockets to each of the requred devices and issues the changes?

 

[Paul G. Tobey [eMVP]]

"more than one at a time"? If I understand what you're saying there, then
it's time to architect a completely custom system. Obviously, you can't
connect to multiple Web servers at the same time and do the same transaction
to them all from a browser. That wouldn't make any sense to a browser user
(and, for that matter, the devices might be set up differently initially, so
what 'current state' would be display when there were 10, say, different
states trying to be set at the same time).

It seems to me that what you want is to establish a configuration on a
single server machine to which the mobile devices periodically connect to
check for updates and changes in the configuration Management is centrally
controlled, although you can set things up so that different devices have
different configurations (you'll want to name the devices in some way so
that you can do this). You might do this with a Web server and suitable
scripting on the server side, and then you could use code on the mobile
devices to query page contents that are specific to a given deivce and whose
contents would be generated on the fly by the server based on the current
configuration settings and the device name. For example, a device called
"Tommy" might try to load the page
http://www.sounds2000.com/deviceconfigurations/Tommy/index.html. The server
could generate the page contents based on the configuration, stored in a
database or something...

Paul T.

 

[Paul G. Tobey [eMVP]]

The difficulty with that is IP addresses. If the devices are using, say,
GPRS to connect to the world, their IP addresses are not well-known to the
server in the home office and they would change from one logon to the next.
If they are on a single network and can be statically assigned, then there's
no problem, but that doesn't work out to be the case very often. Of course,
the devices could *initiate* the connections, periodically say, to the
server, which could potentially have a well-known IP address and get their
updates that way, but having the server initiate the updates is, well, hard.

Paul T.

 

[Joseph Byrns]

Or they could do something along the lines of a local version of NoIP.com,
and every time the device gets a new IP address it could tell the local
WebServer via a webservice or even sockets again?

 

[Paul G. Tobey [eMVP]]

Could do. There would have to be a good reason to spend the 'money' to
connect and then just register, rather than simply checking for the updates
at that point. Further, if you're talking GPRS you probably aren't going to
keep that open all the time anyway, so part (or even most), of the time, you
don't have an accessible IP address at all. That registration scheme is
very well suited for the DHCP case of address assignment on a local network
where the device is reliably connected from that point forward, but just
doesn't have a predictable address.

Paul T.