Connection Manager Overview (Windows Embedded CE 6.0)

1/6/2010

Connection Manager centralizes and automates the establishment and management of network connections for applications that run on a Windows Embedded CE powered device. Typical examples of data networks include the Internet and a Bluetooth wireless connection. An application can request that Connection Manager establish or schedule a connection to a particular type of network. Then, Connection Manager handles the details of that connection.

Benefits of Using Connection Manager

Connection Manager simplifies connectivity by separating out the details of network-connection settings from application code. The primary purpose of the Connection Manager is to centralize and automate the establishment and management of various kinds of network connections. Thus, an application only requires information about which network to access rather than all of the connection settings.

With Connection Manager, an application is configured to specify a connection name and network name. Connection Manager performs all of the tasks associated with establishing the connection.

If you create a connected application, you can use the Connection Manager API to integrate the Connection Manager functionality into your application.

Connection Manager Feature Overview

Connection Manager supports the following features:

• Scheduled automatic connections to a network
• Demand-dialed automatic connections to a network
• Demand-dialed user-initiated connections to a network
• Automatic connection selection
• AlwaysOn operation
• Suspend-and-resume operation
• Scheduled connection optimization
• Shared resource arbitration
• Resource arbitration callback
• Sharing of one connection among multiple applications
• Support for determining connection attributes, such as cost, bandwidth, and latency

Connection Manager Functionality

An application that runs on a Windows Embedded CE powered device can rely on Connection Manager to provide the following services.

Connection Requests

When an application requests a connection, Connection Manager establishes that connection by using the optimal connection type and then notifies all applications that the connection is active.

Connection Management

Connection Manager tracks which connections the applications request and which connections are active. Connection Manager closes unused connections, automatically disconnects connections when they are idle for a specified period of time, and closes low-priority connections to open high-priority connections. For example, voice connections are typically given a higher priority than data connections.

Automatic Connections

Connection Manager can also provide automatic connections for an application. After an automatic connection has been established, you can display an icon in the shell user interface (UI) of the Windows Embedded CE powered device to indicate to the user that the device is using a data connection.

Error Handling

When a connection error occurs, the error is reported back to the application requesting the connection. If multiple errors occur during a connection attempt, only the most recent error is shown to the user.

See Also

Concepts

Connection Manager Architecture

Other Resources

Connection Manager