Archive: PocketPC / Smartphone installations


PocketPC / Smartphone installations
Hi all,

I need to write a quite complex installation script for Pocket PC. So far I used e-pocketsetup but the software has some bugs and the author NEVER answers questions. So I need a new tool to write my installers.
Could please anybody answer the following questions:

- What is the general concept of NSIS installer to write setups for mobile devices? Do I need to use the Microsoft tools to create CAB files (or is there anything easier and better someone can recommend)?

- I need to present a form where the user has to type in personal information such as e-mail, name, address, preferred language etc. How can I best design such a dialog (Eclipse Plugin or anything else?)

- Parts of this information need to be stored in the registry of the DEVICE! How can this be done (write my own Setup DLL with RAPI calls?)

- I need to call a web service to automatically generate and install a license key or to verify an existing licensekey if the user can enter one. Can I call a URL and save a return value in a variable? (I have written the web service such, that it simply returns a string containing a value, no HTML code)

- In general how can I access the PDA or Smartphone from within the setup program? (e.g. to get device specific information such as how much memory is free to install my software, device ID etc) Is that possible with NSIS?

Many thanks for your help.

Thomas


The following pages instruct you how to create installations for Pocket PC and Smartphone. I assume the utilities described in there allow you to write to the device's registry. If not, come back for more.

http://nsis.sourceforge.net/Pocket_P...ing_ActiveSync
http://nsis.sourceforge.net/NSIS_for_Smartphone

You can use a designer to visually create custom pages using InstallOptions. I suggest you take a look at the examples before. You can find them at Examples\InstallOptions and Examples\Modern UI\InstallOptions.nsi.

You can access URLs using NSISdl (a plug-in bundled with NSISn) or InetLoad. Both allow you to save the result to a file. You can then read the file contents using FileOpen, FileRead and FileClose.