There has been a flurry of issues in the newsgroups surrounding the use of the common code for Windows CE .NET, so it seemed only right to address this ahead of the headless article. So this month we will focus on modifying the common code that ships with Windows CE .NET.
Windows CE .NET ships with "shared source." This lives in the Private folder for a Windows CE installation. The product also ships with a ton of public or common source, which can be freely modified and shipped as part of your device. Directly modifying the common source sounds like a great idea, but it can also create a number of issues. In fact, the first rule of modifying the common source is... "Don't Alter the Common Source!
This needs some explanation. You can of course easily modify the common source in it's default installation folder, but there are a number of reasons why you should copy the source to a new folder and make changes on the copied code. Indeed, a number of developers are getting caught unaware of the problems when directly changing the common code. In this article we'll discuss these issues and cover the methods to avoid them.Read full storyNote: This article does not cover how to build or modify the private shared source code, although this is discussed in the MSDN article,
Building a Platform Using Modified Shared Source Code.
