Mike Hall
When you boot a Windows CE operating system image that uses the Standard Shell (the shell that looks similar to the Windows Shell, most commonly experienced as the Windows Desktop) you will notice shortcuts to Internet Explorer and the Image Viewer on the desktop. Perhaps, when creating your own operating system image, you might want to create your own shortcuts.
By default, all applications and files are mapped to the \Windows folder. Shortcuts take very little space (as you will see in a moment), and can also include command line parameters (more on that in a moment). Shortcut files are simply text files that can be created and edited using your favorite text editing application.
Let's take a simple example to start, an application that no self-respecting operating system should be without ... Solitaire! Shortcuts have the file extension .lnk, so the shortcut file is going to be Solitare.lnk, and would contain the following:
21#\Windows\solitare.exe
So, how does this work? In the code, 21# tells us that the command line contains 21 characters and that the command line is \Windows\Solitare.exe (which is 21 characters, count them!)
Now, let's take a look at a slightly more elaborate example, (but it's also very simple!) This example is the Internet Explorer shortcut file, iesample.lnk. Here's the content of the file:
27#\Windows\iexplore.exe -home
The command line, including the optional parameter -home is 27 characters. Notice that the Internet Explorer shortcut contains not only the location of the program, but also includes the -home command line. This instructs Internet Explorer to open at the home page. But, wait a second. On the desktop, the shortcut appears as Internet Explorer, not as a shortcut to Iesample. When the Windows CE operating system gets built, we can examine the contents of the overall operating system .dat file, initobj.dat (the .dat file contains the creation of folders and maps files to folders). Here's the interesting line from the .dat file:
Directory("\Windows\Desktop"):-File("Internet Explorer.lnk", "\Windows\iesample.lnk")
Notice how the actual file, \Windows\iesample.lnk, maps to the \Windows\Desktop folder and appears as Internet Explorer.lnk on the desktop. The .dat file entries can be used to map and rename files, pretty cool, eh?
So, there we have it, how to create shortcuts. The next (simple) step would be to add the .lnk file to the operating system image (perhaps using CEFileWiz) and map the file to a folder other than the \Windows folder.
Mike Hall is a Technical Product Manager in the Windows Embedded Product Group. To get more insights into Windows Embedded, read his blog.