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PC Card Development Concepts (Windows Embedded CE 6.0)

  • Article

1/6/2010

The PC Card architecture for Windows Embedded CE supports bus-agnostic drivers and legacy PCMCIA drivers.

Note

A legacy PCMCIA client driver is one that was created prior to Windows CE 5.0 that supports only 16-bit PCMCIA cards. A PC Card driver is one that was created in Windows CE 5.0 that supports both 16 and 32-bit PCMCIA cards and was written using the bus-agnostic driver model. For more information, see PC Card Bus-Agnostic Client Drivers.

Legacy PCMCIA drivers will continue to function correctly due to a compatibility layer that can be added on top of the driver stack. The following illustration shows the PC Card architecture for Windows CE 5.0.

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The PC Card bus driver is responsible for loading and configuring PC Card drivers and has these additional responsibilities:

  • Provides card services for a client driver, including event notification
  • Provides the PC Card default enabler according to specified registry settings
    This functionality is optional and can be turned off through the registry.
  • Provides the client registry setup for configured resources and for loading and activating the client driver
  • Notifies the driver of card status change events

PC Card socket services is separate from PC Card card services and is dynamically bound to the PC Card bus driver during initialization. PC Card socket services should notify the PC Card bus driver during initialization to allow the bus driver to provide a unique index number for the socket driver. The socket driver should also retrieve the PC Card bus driver name from the registry, even if the PC Card bus driver is named Pcc_serv.dll. The registry key name and binding process interface is defined in the Socksv2.h file. The following list shows the responsibilities of the socket driver:

  • Provides the hardware interface
  • Initializes PC Card reader hardware
  • Binds with the bus driver
  • Provides a uniform interface to the PC Card reader hardware
  • Informs the PC Card bus driver of any card status change events

See Also

Concepts

PC Card Bus Driver
PC Card Socket Service Shared Code Library
PC Card Bus-Agnostic Client Drivers

Other Resources

PC Card Drivers