Windows Mobile - Compressing CAB package causes CEAppMgr err

[cbono]

Hello again,

I'm afraid I've run into another stumbling block with the Windows Mobile CAB project in AI. After building the CAB files and incorporating into our larger project, I found that the CE Application Manager (CEAppMgr) rejected the setup .INI file which pointed to the CABs.

After ruling out a problem in the .INI file itself, I started testing with different configurations for the CABs, and eventually realized that turning on the compression setting (Configurations > Media > Compress CAB package) causes the files to be unusable by CEAppMgr. The CABs themselves install fine on Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices, if you copy them over and install from the device. But CEAppMgr cannot deal with the compression. As soon as I rebuild the CABs with compression off, they can be registered/installed as expected.

This is odd, because in our old CAB builder script, we do definitely use the /compress switch with CabWiz.exe.

The error shows on both Windows XP Professional with ActiveSync 4.5:


And on Windows Vista Business with Mobile Device Center 6.1. Vista is slightly different in that, when invoking CeAppMgr the first time it silently fails, with no error message or event log entry. Calling it a second time causes CEAppMgr to crash outright. This is the event log for the second-time crash:


We really need the compression setting, as we are going to include 3 CAB files with our distribution and they weigh in at about 3 MB each uncompressed (but only 1.2 MB compressed).

I'm happy to provide any additional details to help debug further.

-Chris

[Ionut]

Hi Chris,

The problem is caused by missing metadata in the generated CAB packages. When the CAB files are left uncompressed, CEAppMgr can determine this required information directly, but not when compression is used.

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. The next Advanced Installer version will include a fix for this issue.

Regards,
Ionut

[cbono]

Thanks, Ionut... I look forward to the update.

Despite this minor problem, your Windows Mobile support is excellent, and for me, timely. I just implemented an additional configuration for our WinMo packages that would have been very difficult to manually write out as a single INF file. I thought I'd have to maintain multiple scripts, but I was able to define all my configurations in one project and build them in one step.