Windows Mobile Vista support

[davidh]

A lot of people have been asking about Windows Mobile support for Vista. So, I thought I would post here to help clear things up.

According to our documentation, we support ActiveSync installations. See the 2008 release notes:
http://support.installshield.com/kb/view.asp?articleid=Q112996#sysreq

However, initial testing has shown that our current mobile installations work on Vista's new 'Mobile Device Center', which has replaced Active Sync on Vista. See the following link for more information:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/activesync/activesync45.mspx

Basically, the support still works because we launch CEAPPMGR.EXE, which is installed with the Mobile Device Center. We look in the registry key HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths\CEAPPMGR.EXE to find the path to CEAPPMGR.EXE. The path on my machine is 'C:\Windows\WindowsMobile\CEAppMgr.exe'.

So, in order to sync your mobile install with your mobile device, make sure to install 'Active Sync' or 'Mobile Device Center' first. If you have any problems, check for the existence of CEAppMgr.exe. Lastly, make sure you are using a MSI (such as Basic MSI) project type, because the Smart Device project type does not call CEAppMgr.exe.

I had one small problem on Vista, hard to reproduce, where the install had problems if the device was not plugged in at the time of the install. Even though I got a message that the install would be put on the device once it was plugged in, it didn't happen immediately upon plugging in the device. It did happen eventually. I've had inconsistent results where sometimes it DOES happen immediately. I can't reproduce that at this point but I had another work colleague run into that. If anyone else has any problems\questions about mobile support for Vista, please post here so we can get it resolved as soon as possible.

[davidh]

If your device is not connected while running the setup, we have seen the following error in some cases on Vista machines:

---------------------------
Device Not Connected
---------------------------
Application Manager can run only when a mobile device is connected.
---------------------------
OK
---------------------------

For now, to get around this, try running\launching as administrator. This is being tracked with issue#IOC-000062599

[Anonymous]

I have run into an issue that may be related.

My setup creates a "Reinstall on mobile device" shortcut to CEAPPMGR.EXE using the path obtained from the registry (as you do) and with the Installshield-created ini file as a parameter.

On Vista, I get an error message to the effect that the setup file is invalid. I found a reference to this message somewhere, and read that CEAPPMGR.EXE doesn't automatically run with sufficient rights to do an install.

It appears that IS2008 launches it with admin rights, but my shortcut doesn't.

I found that if I enable "Run as administrator" in the shortcut's Advanced properties, it works fine.

There doesn't appear to be any way to create this shortcut properly in IS2008.

Any suggestions?

Regards,
David

[davidh]

That does sound similar. CEAppMgr.exe requires admin rights on Vista. It sounds like your shortcut work around works, right? The work order (once implemented) listed above will ensure that CEAppMgr.exe runs with admin rights during the InstallShield install.

[Anonymous]

davidh wrote:
It sounds like your shortcut work around works, right?.

Yes and no. It works (i.e. solves the problem), but it's not a viable workaround as it's beyond the technical capability of 90% of our users to right-click on anything, let alone click on an "Advanced" button without their pointy little heads exploding.

davidh wrote:
The work order (once implemented) listed above will ensure that CEAppMgr.exe runs with admin rights during the InstallShield install.

It already appears to run with admin rights during the InstallShield install.

The problem is when it's launched other than by InstallShield... from my shortcut and (maybe) when a device is connected later.

I take it there's no way to create a "Run as administrator" shortcut from within IS2008?

David

[davidh]

Yeah, it is too bad that CEAppMgr.exe does not prompt to elevate.

We certainly don't want any heads exploding, but there is no support in 2008 to create a shortcut that runs as an administrator. If you are willing to write some code, there appears to be a workaround out there. A colleague of mine pointed me to the following link:
http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1439749&SiteID=1

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the pointer. I added a function to my helper DLL, added a few lines of InstallScript to OnMoved(), and it works fine.

BTW, is there any way in InstallScript to obtain the location or filename of a shortcut created by IS, or do I have to cobble it together myself using FOLDER_PROGRAMS? (The string table entries for the shortcut are all in shortname|longname format.)

Cheers,
David

[oleg_shastitko]

Hello
I use Windows Server 2008 and it has not this key in regedit:
http://data0.floomby.ru/getfile.aspx?guid=4d8b44ed-ee60-47f4-bb42-b554684322b8

also folder \Windows\WindowsMobile has wmdSync.exe instead of ceappmgr.exe

http://data0.floomby.ru/getfile.aspx?guid=65f0eddb-454d-4414-b69f-0f29e9a631ab