Flash back to Windows CE .Net 4.2

Last few weeks I have been involved into a customer project running Windows CE 4.2…. Woooaa a big jump in the past. I don't know if you were already involved in Windows CE at this time, but a big gap is visible between this version of Windows CE and the latest one… Thanks to Microsoft for all those improvements… Connectivity options was Configure Remote Connection… so i took me 10 minutes to find the right menu, as every thing change… But one thing that I found really surprising is the time spent to do a sysgen under Windows CE 4.2 with the most up-to-date development Platform. It took me only 10 minutes, while it was around 40 minutes on the best computer available at the release of Windows CE 4.2… oups I should say Windows CE .Net 4.2, the time when the .Net revolution starts :-).

The KITL over serial implementation give me a big headache, as at the time of Windows CE 4.2 the frames sent and received by the target where created and checked by the OAL itself before forwarding them to the upper layer of KITL… meaning that you had to know exactly the format of the frames sent and received by Platform Builder, otherwise the default KITL over serial implementation of Platform Builder was not able to communicate with the target. You can imagine that finding this information is not so easy as the MSDN documentation at this time was not so complete as it is now. But thanks to free sample BSPs, and to my favorite web search engine , I found my grale : "The definition of the KITL frames".

So as an archive for the Windows CE community here is the KITL header definition for Windows CE 4.2 : Header - Data - Trailer

typedef struct _SERIAL_PACKET_HEADER
{
UCHAR headerSignature[HEADER_SIGNATURE_BYTES];
UCHAR pktType;
UCHAR Reserved;
USHORT payloadSize;
UCHAR crcData;
UCHAR crcHdr;
} SERIAL_PACKET_HEADER;

With :

• headerSignature : the signature of the header : { 'k', 'I', 'T', 'L' }
• pktType : use by KITL to identify the service associated to the frame
• payloadSize : packet data size, not including this header
• crcData : packet data check sum (simple, 8-bit crc)
• crcHdr : header data checksum (simple, 8-bit crc)

The simple 8 bits check sum algorithm :
UCHAR ComputeChecksum(PUCHAR pBuf, USHORT len)
{
USHORT s = 0;
UCHAR csum = 0;

for(s = 0; s < len; s++)
csum += *(pBuf + s);

return csum;
}


- Nicolas