Each Bee Mobile control which is inherited from BeeMobile.Common.DoubleBufferingControl (and that is the case for majority of them) uses 3 bitmaps to speed up the drawing.

Symptoms:

• Properties are missing in Properties pane.
• Some properties cannot be edited.
• Properties are dimmed in the properties pane.
• Descriptions for the properties are missing.

On some Windows CE devices you may receive the error:
Can’t find PInvoke DLL ‘BeeMobile.Common.dll’

The presence of PNG image decoder in your OS depends on the presence of SYSGEN_IMAGING_PNG_DECODE variable during the build of OS image.

Based on our experience, if a Windows CE (Windows Compact 7) device fails to draw transparent controls, it is because it is missing AlphaBlend function from its WIN API. AlphaBlend function is present in coredll.dll. During the build of the OS image the OS designer can choose, whether AlphaBlend function will be present or will not be present in the OS by setting / not-setting the SYSGEN_GDI_ALPHABLEND variable.

This article describes how to work around the inability to add Bee Mobile iPack CF39 controls to toolbox of Visual Studio 2012 / 2013.

Microsoft admits that it is not possible to add custom controls which target Compact Framework v. 3.9 to Visual Studio toolbox here:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh300132.aspx (see “Application Development: Managed code and designer” section) and advices to add a control manually in code.

If you want a Bee Mobile control to display a PNG image, you usually have two choices. You can either add the PNG image to the control from your project’s resources or from a file (some controls provide even more possibilities, e.g., you can load the PNG image from a byte array or from a MemoryStream).

A lot of people are asking for help regarding PNG image decoding on

• Windows CE
• Windows Embedded Compact 7
• Windows Embedded Compact 2013

so let’s shed some light into this topic.

You may notice that on some builds of Windows CE, Windows Embedded Compact 7, Windows Embedded Compact 2013 (and other Windows Embedded operating systems) the OS animates the showing (opening) of a form by drawing expanding rectangles animation. While some may find this animation appealing, the others would like to turn the animation off. So in case you fall into the latter category, here is how to.

1. Open any registry editor.

2. Find this registry key: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\GWE]

3. Make sure the following key:value pair is present: "Animate"=dword:0

If “Animate” key is not present, add it and reboot.

One of major drawbacks of Windows CE is that if you output text to the screen, then by default it is aliased. By putting out a text on the screen I mean putting a control on a form which displays a text. I am going to show you a technique how to output an anti-aliased text provided two conditions are met:

1. The font family you are using supports anti-aliasing.
2. The font is big enough.