I'm develop an application that will be use around the world and need establish communication with a handheld device to transfer files from/to the application. This application is develop is Visual Basic 2005.

Then, also the handheld devices will be use around the world, their administration will be very hard. The simple ActiveSync installation on the local desktop should be made by not specialized people. Furthermore, every time that the handheld's battery off, the operator has to reconfigure the ActiveSync connection.

To avoid all the problems above, the ideal is establish a communication without the ActiveSync. Then, how can RAPI classes (from opennetcf) be used on computers without Activesync installed? Have a DLL that can be added at the application compilation that replaced the Activesync?

Thanks, MarcCama

The bottom line is you can't use the Desktop Communicaton library without ActiveSync or Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC).  Both ActiveSync and WMDC ship with a library which contains the Remote API (RAPI). The Desktop Communication lbrary has a dependency on RAPI.

To circumvent the problem of having to "reconfigure the ActiveSync connection" when the battery has been run dry, you can set a registry key which will force ActiveSync to establish a "Guest Only" connection with all devices. Simply create a new DWORD value called GuestOnly with a value of 1 at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows CE Services. You can do this programmatically or as part of your application installation.