KnowDotNet NetRefactor  Communicating with a Device from the
Desktop  by William Ryan Print this Article Discuss in Forums
Communicating with a connected device is quite distinct from
communicating with other desktop macines or a server.
Considering that PDA's use a different OS and a different
processor, this revelation is hardly surprising. In this regard,
there's some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that
it takes a little more work than you may acustomed to in order
to communicate with a device. The good news is that 1) it's
possible 2) Once you understand what's going on, it's fairly
straightforward.  The primary mechanism for desktop to device (d
to d) communication is knows as RAPI . RAPI is code for using
any of the functionality exposed in RAPI.dll which resides on
the desktop machine. Currently, there's no native managed
provider to access RAPI, so you are going to have to delve into
the unmanaged world. has an implementation which wraps the
functionality of RAPI in an easy-to-use libra