Yup, excellent reply, Scott.
If you don't want to get your hands dirty with C++ code, you can use
our app, PocketPC Installer:
http://www.pocketpcinstaller.com
Basically, you drag your CF .cab file, and any other .cab files you might
need (SQL, SQLCE and your application .cab) into our app, and it
compresses all the files - and the code to install them - into one,
standalone, PocketPC .exe file.
Remember, most .cab files AREN'T compressed, so you end up with
a large .exe file, but it's a LOT smaller than the total filesizes of your
..cab files.
From there, you copy this PDA installer .exe file onto your device as:
\Storage Card\2577\autorun.exe
... and whenever your device hard-resets, or if the user removes/inserts
the card into a fresh device, it'll go through and install your .cab files,
one by one.
It's also got some useful stuff in there -
- you can choose which .cab files you want installing on each device
type. However, it won't let you install a .cab file onto an incompatible
device (such as a VS2005 ARMv5 .cab onto a PPC2002 device).
- by default, it'll only install .cab files that haven't already been
installed
on this device, although you can ask it to re-install certain .cabs
regardless.
- you can ask it to soft-reset your device afterwards
- it also has intelligence to get around a problem with some devices
kicking off these autorun.exe's when the device comes out of the Idle
state. (In other words, when you first turn on your device in the
morning, you don't *want* to see it attempt to start re-installing
everything.)
It's ridiculously easy to use, and extremely powerful.
Oh, and *aswell* as creating a standalone PocketPC installer .exe
file, it also creates a standalone Desktop installer .exe file. Once again,
this is just one file that you can send to a friend for them to run on
their PC, and it'll copy and install everything you want onto their
device. Very cool.
Hope this helps.
James