SDK for an XPe Image

[Guest]

Hi,

Is there a tool that can generate a Windows platform SDK based on the
components that are included in an XPe image?

Background:
It is intended that third party vendors be able to create custom
applications that run on our embedded platform. It would be nice to provide
them an SDK that would guarantee that their applications use only those APIs
that are provided in the image.

I'm told the the Windows CE toolset has such functionality and was wondering
if such a thing existed for XPe.

Thanks,
Ed.

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Ed,

XPe and CE are two completely different beasts and XPe do not have this option.
You must work closely with them and see what requirements they have so you can add enough functionality that they will need.

Or they can make image and test it on XP Pro and then you can make XPe to support their application.

Regards,
Slobodan

 

[Daniel Simpson \(MS\)]

Hi Ed,

XPE uses the same APIs for Windows XP Pro (provided the components are
included in your run-time). If you want to add broad support for
applications, you can check out the SP2 application compatability macro
components:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/xpehelp/html/xeoriEnsuringApplicationCompatibility.asp

Generally we refer people to the Windows SDK. Also, the component help does
include all of the supported interfaces included in the component. You will
need to review the component help documentation that shipped with the SP2
tools as the component help docs are not online. But Slobodan is right--
there's no automated way to detect the interfaces you can program against.

Hope this helps
Dan

 

[KM]

Just to add to that my two cents.

Although it would be really, really great feature of XPE to have a way to roll out a platform SDK (as CE PB does), it will unlikely
be implemented on XPe since there is only "binary" build available there.

CE [PB], in contrast to XPe, is provided with all the public project SDKs (libraries, headers, etc.) and has a deeper level of
componentization than XPe.

Let's cross our fingers and hope LHe would have more flexibility there.

 

[David D]

What I think would be better is a way to do a dependancy check on an
application and compare it to a file list that is extracted out of a build.
That will at least tell you if your target application will find all the
files it needs on a target system.

Is there such a program that would allow one to manage this?

I have run Dependancy walker 2.1 by Steve Miller to find such issues but
only on the Target. I wish I had something to give to my developers to run
so that every time they install a DLL on thier system they can know it does
not exist in my build and then when they run the depends, it compares to a
file and not the local system. I'd make that a checkoff to thier list before
submitting new target software to me.

 

[KM]

David,

Using Dependency Walker 2.1 (and even 2.0) you can set the list of "working directories" that will allow you to analyze a binary
dependency on your dev machine but using your image build directories only.

 

[Guest]

Thanks to everyone that contributed. It confirmed my own research