Tip of the Month (May 2004)

Removing Forms and Tables

In Visual CE there is the notion of "tables" and "forms". Tables are clouds of information that only a computer can see. Forms are applications that take data from a table and put it on the screen for you to see, then take data you enter on the screen and put it into a table.

After a while, you may decide to remove a form (and possibly its underlying table) from a handheld. Here's how...

A form is just a file. The icon looks like a little yellow form and the file name ends in .VCE (you won't see the .VCE if you are hiding file extensions). To remove a form, run ActiveSync on the desktop, click Explore, navigate to the file, and delete it.

If you originally put the form on the handheld using Visual CE's FILE | DOWNLOAD FORM or FILE | DOWNLOAD TABLE, Visual CE created an entry on the START menu. To remove this entry, run ActiveSync on the desktop, click Explore, navigate to \My Pocket PC\Windows\Start Menu\Programs. Each icon here is one icon in the START | PROGRAMS menu. Just delete the icon for the form.

You might also want to delete the underlying table of the form. To do this, run Visual CE on the desktop and select FILE | DELETE TABLE. Select the name of the table to delete and click OK.

In the Free Downloads section there are some Visual CE Add-On Tools. One of these tools (the "expunge" tool) can be used to easily delete the form, the shortcut, and (optionally) the table, all at once.