Tip of the Month (October 2011)

Resolving 'Form not found' When Creating a Runtime

When creating a runtime (FILE | CREATE DISTRIBUTION FILES), you may see the error message "Form not found on Windows CE device: MyForm.vce". What this means is that, someplace in your application, you refer to MyForm.vce, but MyForm.vce is not on the handheld.

It can be difficult to find where your application references MyForm.vce. It'll take a bit of detective work to figure this out.

One way to figure this out is to open Visual CE on the desktop and, for each form in your application, do the following:

1. Open the form in the form designer
2. Select FILE | SAVE AS
3. For "File name", change the extension from .vce to .txt
4. Press down and hold the SHIFT key
5. While the SHIFT key is still depressed, click SAVE

The .txt file you specified in step (3) will have a textual description of the form. Open that file using a text editor such as notepad, and search for MyForm.vce. One (or more) of the forms probably uses it.

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