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INTERNET STEP-BY-STEP
Create your own Windows CE Mobile Channel
By Craig Peacock
Windows CE Mobile Channels are among the best kept secrets going. In this article, I'll show you how you can create your own channel with just some basic HTML (i.e., HyperText Markup Language) Web page writing skills. As many of you know, I have a Web site about Windows CE called "Craig Peacock's - Windows CE Palm-Size PC Pages". I've turned these pages into my own Mobile Channel. As part of this article, I'll also give you source code for my channel to use as a guide. Figure A shows you what my Mobile Channel looks like.
FIGURE A
 
Check out my Mobile Channel. Roll over picture for a larger image.
What's a Mobile Channel?
The Microsoft Windows CE Palm-sized PC user manual describes a channel as follows:
A channel is a Web site or other Web-formatted content that is available for offline viewing on your Palm-sized PC. Channels allow Internet, Intranet, or other Web-formatted content to be automatically downloaded to your Palm-sized PC from your desktop computer via synchronization.
The Windows CE Palm-sized PCs have the Mobile Channels Browser on them as a standard feature. It's an optional download for Handheld PC users. In this article I'll explain how to write a Mobile Channel by dissecting the code of my Mobile Channel piece by piece.
Even if you don't have a Web page, this article will be interesting for just about any Windows CE user. You'll get a much better idea of how Mobile Channels work, and that'll help you get the most out of them.
Enabling synchronization
When you visit a Web page using Microsoft Internet Explorer on your PC, if that Web site owner has written a Mobile Channel, you'll see a special subscribe icon. Clicking on that icon will subscribe you to that channel. The next time you synchronize with your Palm-sized PC, the synchronization process will copy the contents of the channel to your device for later, offline browsing.
On some machines, you'll have to enable synchronization of channels. You do this using the ActiveSync Options dialog of the Mobile Devices application. Make sure to check the Channel Item check box, as shown in Figure B.
FIGURE B
 
Enable channel synchronization using the ActiveSync Options dialog. Roll over picture for a larger image.
Deciding on content
Before you embark on your journey to create a Mobile Channel, consider the content and the type of information you want to contain on the channel. Robert Hess wrote a fabulous article on the subject of mobile content back in June 1998. The link is at the end of this article in the "Product availability and resources" section.
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