CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#printingwindows-ce
Rich Shealer
Rich Shealer

Reputation: 3524

Does Windows CE 5 have a standard printing system?

I’m looking at creating a stand-alone application that scans several bar codes and at the end prints a receipt. I’m trying to understand from a developer prospective if there are standard calls to print via Windows CE.

The yet unspecified device would support at least Windows CE 5 up to a Windows Mobile 6/6.5. These would be a Motorola Symbol/Datalogic type hand held scanning terminal. The application would be used on whatever device we chose, not a broad range of products.

I’ve seen third-party libraries listed. Are these still relevant with more modern Windows Mobile releases?

I can send the specific codes to a printer outside of a printing system, but I don't want to go that route if printing is can be done "normally."

I expect to use VS 2005 or 2008 with C# depending on the model's support.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2189

Answers (1)

Thorsten Dittmar
Thorsten Dittmar

Reputation: 56717

There is no printer support on Windows CE devices. What we've successfully done is to connect a Zebra receipt printer to the device via Bluetooth and send ZPL code directly to the COM port emulation. We were able to print on that device like this.

There is, however, no standard way that I know of.

While I'm not sure what more detail I could add, I'll try my best to describe what we did:

We had a little Windows CE industrial device (while I think it was a Datalogic device, the process should work with other devices, too) with Bluetooth support and a Bluetooth receipt printer that was capable of understanding the Zebra printer language (ZPL).

We connected the printer to the device via Bluetooth so that we could access the printer via a "Bluetooth COM Port". From then on, we were able to send ZPL code to the printer from our own applications and have the printer print what we sent, just as if the printer was directly connected using a serial cable.

In our application we had a little ZPL template into which we filled the information required. The user was then able to walk around with the mobile device, fill in forms and print labels.

The only catch was to re-enable the Bluetooth pairing after the scanner had gone into suspend mode, but I guess that's something you have to figure out depending on the device types - maybe there are even settings to have the connection re-established on your device.

Upvotes: 2

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