Is File Watcher available in Windows Mobile

Question

I'll be developing a Windows Mobile 6 application for an industrial scanning device that has a camera. Assuming there is no SDK providing access to the camera and the resulting picture, does WM6 provide file watching ability similar to the desktop OS?

Answer 1

That depends on what you mean by "file watching ability".

Do you mean an API that fires an event when a file is changed? Yes, it has the same one as the desktop OS FindFirstChangeNotification

For example usage, see: Using CeGetFileNotificationInfo

Answer 2

You may have multiple options for accessing the camera:

1. You can access the camera via SHCameraCapture on Windows Mobile. See MSDN for more information. You can control the file name and path of the saved image. This approach uses the standard Windows Mobile Camera Capture dialog. This is the simplest approach and should work on any Windows Mobile device.
2. You can access the camera via DirectShow. I would only recommend doing this if you MUST create a custom UI for the camera dialog. There is a Win32 sample written in C showing how to do this included with the Windows Mobile SDK at Windows Mobile 6 SDK\Samples\PocketPC\CPP\win32\CameraCapture.
3. Some OEM provide a proprietary API to access the camera. Check with the vendor of your Windows Mobile device. This approach would only work on a specific device.

You can also monitor a directory for file system changes using FindFirstChangeNotification. See MSDN for more information.