Tip of the Month (July 2007)

Populating the Northwinds Mobile Traders Database

Visual CE comes with a sample order entry application called Northwind Mobile Traders (on your handheld, START | PROGRAMS | NORTHWIND MOBILE TRADERS). This is a mobile rendition of the Northwind Traders database that comes with Microsft Access.

In order to use this sample, you need some data and the easiest way to populate this data is to use the Visual CE synchronizer. To do this:

1. Dowload the data by clicking here.
2. Put the downloaded NWIND.MDB in the root of the C: drive on your desktop machine.
3. Run Visual CE on your desktop machine
4. Select FILE | SYNCHRONIZE. Set "Desktop Datasource" to "MS Access Database". Set "Desktop Database" to C:\NWIND.MDB. Press the CLOSE button
5. Use Visual CE's FILE | DELETE TABLE to remove the following tables from your handheld (if they are there):
   • Customers
   • Orders
   • Order Details
   • Products
   • Categories
   • Employees
   • Shippers
   • Suppliers
6. Close Visual CE
7. In a text editor (such as notepad), open up the WCEODBC.INI file you downloaded in step (1), select all the text, and copy it to the clipboard.
8. Still in notepad, open a file called WCEODBC.INI that is in your windows folder and paste the clipboard contents to the end of the file. Save the modified WCEODBC.INI file and close notepad.
9. Open up Visual CE on the desktop again. Select FILE | SYNCHRONIZE and press the GO button.

When the synchronizer completes, the Northwind Mobile Traders tables in the handheld will be created and populated with data. To start the application on the handheld, select START | PROGRAMS | NORTHWIND MOBILE TRADERS.