in reply to Accessing PDA in cradle from Windows

I've looked in the direction of doing that myself as well, but there are some ugly problems, as the connection is not exported as a "drive" per se, but as an Explorer Namespace Extension. You will find that your PDA is visible in the Explorer not as a drive (letter) but as something separate, and that (in most cases) the behaviour when copying files is different from the standard behaviour, as it is programmed by the implementors of the PDA driver.

The direction you need to go is to create a (pure) COM interface to IShellFolder and/or IShellBrowser, which will mean some C or C++ wrapping and much reading of the MSDN documentation. If you are lucky, you can grab whatever communication your PDA tools do, by installing a wrapping USB sniffer, or by looking at the locally cached files.

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Re^2: Accessing PDA in cradle from Windows
by traveler (Parson) on Mar 27, 2005 at 18:26 UTC
    I don't think it is that bad. There is a library for accessing the device called RAPI. It communicates over TCP port 990 to which ActiveSync is listening. I don't have a compiler on my XP to wrap the library, and I am not an XS guru at any rate.
      The thing is, it's fundamentally silly that one should have to deal with such a library. Why should I have to write two different code bases to perform what is essentially just a file system operation? This destroys any reasonable expectation of writing portable and extensible code.