The standard shell for Windows CE looks somewhat similar to Windows 95/Windows 2000 with the Start Menu, task bar, desktop, and icons/shortcuts. If you build a CE 6.0 image based on the PDA template you get the standard shell which includes one program on the start menu, this is the 'File Explorer'. So how do you add your own applications to the Start Menu? The first thing to determine is exactly where the Start Menu appears in the operating system.
We can use the Remote File Viewer to examine a running operating system image. Here's the Windows folder tree from the running operating system image - you can see that I've highlighted the Windows Programs folder on the left side of the File Viewer application, the right side shows the contents of the Windows Programs folder - here we can see the 'Windows Explorer.lnk' file - this is a shortcut to the actual 'Windows Explorer' application, which lives in the Windows folder (I have a comment about this later.) So, what does the 'Windows Explorer.lnk' file contain? - let's go take a look the build release folder. For my Windows CE project (called StartMenu) the build release folder is going to be C: WINCE600 OSDesigns StartMenu StartMenu RelDir DeviceEmulatorARMV4IRelease.
A quick search for 'Windows Explorer.lnk' doesn't find anything, but there is a.lnk file called 'explore.lnk', could this be the 'Windows Explorer.lnk' file we're looking for? Here's the contents of the file. 21# windows explorer.exe This is how a shortcut is formatted (similar to a BSTR), the number of characters in the string, followed by the string - go ahead, count them.
Jan 14, 2011 - I have a mio moov R503T win 6.0 CE, one of the newer mios.Thanks. I have device with wince 6.0 and the file explorer.exe is missing in it. Update Windows CE 6.0 on Mongoose Nomad GPS unit. I just recently purchased a Mongoose Nomad GPS unit which had Windows Embedded CE 6.0 Core installed. When you connect the device to your computer a window showing 'Windows Mobile' comes up and a number of options including one to a link to update software etc.
![6.0 6.0](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125423168/487509467.gif)
Yep, there's 21 characters in the path to the executable. This is the shortcut file we're looking for, but doesn't have the right name, we're looking for 'Windows Explorer.lnk'.