We have an application we can run with Visual Studio 2003 that uses SQL CE 2.0. We have ADSLOAD set to copy the SQLCE CAB file to ram at boot time.
If we also have ADSLOAD start the CAB file, it asks for a user prompt and hangs. (We don't want the users to have any interaction at this point).
Is there a way to
A. Skip the prompt with a command line entry from ADSLOAD.
B. Load and register everything from ADSLOAD.
C. Some other way to get it to start up automatically.
I have not been able to get it to fire up using ADSLOAD per method B above. I can get ADSLOAD to copy ssce20.dll, ssceca20.dll, and ssceerror20jp.dll to \windows\sqlce 2.0\ and sscemw20.dll to \windows\, but can't figure out how to get cgacutil.exe to register them or whatever else is needed.
Yeah, unfortunately there's still no way to do a "silent" installation of CAB files. It's a gripe we know that the MS developers have heard, but so far no change in the app.
Take a look at topics 165 and 168 concerning CAB files. You can extract the files from the .CAB and perform a diff on the system registry before and after the installation. That will tell you how the .DLLs were registered. Then you can alter your ADSLOAD.REG and or use ADSCopy.exe ADSReg.exe to set those registry values.
Use the remote registry editor (via ActiveSync) to download a copy of the registry before and after the installation. Then use a tool like WinDiff, fc, MS Word or other file comparison tool to determine changes.
An Ethernet Activesync connection makes a big difference in reducing download time, as the full registry is usually 200-300kB.