VBCE is technically called the "Microsoft Windows CE Toolkit for Visual Basic 5.0". It is essentially an Add-in for the Visual Basic 5.0 IDE. It allows the creation of Visual Basic applications that will run on the Windows CE 2.0 operating system. One thing to realize right from the start, VBCE is not VB 5 on Windows CE, it is its own version of Visual Basic derived from the Microsoft VBScript engine. There are many things that VBCE cannot do that VB can, some of these limitations are because of the Windows CE operating system, and some are simply because the Windows CE operating system is a small system, usually incorporated on handheld PC's with very little memory.

How does VBCE differ from Visual Basic 5.0?

VBCE has many limitations as compared to VB 5, but many of these are understood in the light of the Windows CE 2.0 operating system that it has to run on. Some of the most notable limitations are as follows:

ActiveX controls created in VB 5 cannot be used in VBCE, the ActiveX control creation abilities of VB5 do not compile to the Mips or SH3 processors that run Windows CE, nor does VB5 runtime run on these processors. Any ActiveX controls that you use in VBCE will need to be created in VCCE.

There is no ability to call API's directly from VBCE. If an API call is needed, you will need to create a VCCE control that calls the API for you.

Visual Basic Class files are not supported

Only one *.bas file is supported

Help is not supported - You will need to find a control that duplicates the Shell functionallity (which VBCE does not have) so that you can shell to the HPC HTML Help engine to launch you help file.

Language errors will be displayed at runtime

Designers and insertable objects, such as Excel, are not supported

What are the system requirements for VBCE?

VBCE requires Windows NT 4.0 (sp3 or later) and Visual Basic 5.0 (sp2 or later). The applications you build with VBCE will run on devices running Windows CE 2.0 and later. A handheld device is not required for development, as you can test and debug your applications in a Windows CE emulator that is included.