PC Card Drivers

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Stream interface drivers for PC (PCMCIA) cards are PC Card client drivers. PC Card client drivers use the PC Card services library to interact with their PC Card devices. Because the PC Card services library handles all the details of moving data across the PCMCIA bus, the stream interface drivers for PC Card devices are free to work on device-specific tasks. Microsoft® Windows® CE .NET supports PC Card Type II sockets. PC Card client drivers can also interact with the PC Card socket services library if necessary.

Most PC Card socket functions have a parameter that represents a socket and function pair. A socket and function pair is a combination of one particular PC Card socket and one particular function of a PC Card. Socket and function pairs support multifunction PC Cards and platforms with more than one PC Card socket. Your drivers for multifunction cards should register one device file name for each function. Any drivers that you develop for PC Cards should also work with any socket index, because different platforms have different numbers of PC Card sockets.

If you develop a generic PC Card driver, which is one that can drive an entire class of PC Cards adhering to a specified operating standard, you need an additional entry point in the dynamic-link library (DLL) for a detection function. The Device Manager uses the detection function when a user inserts an unknown PC Card with no Plug and Play identifier. This function must conform to the PFN_DETECT_ENTRY prototype declared in %_WINCEROOT%\Public\Common\DDK\Inc\DevLoad.h.

Note   User-level applications cannot access the PC Card Services library directly. An application that attempts to call the LoadLibrary function will encounter errors because of the way the Device Manager manages the PC Card Services library. For applications that must access these functions, use a small, intermediate device driver that provides wrappers around the functions in the library. For more information, see LoadLibrary.

See Also

Device Manager | PC Card Driver Architecture | PC Card Driver Samples | PC Card Driver Registry Settings

 Last updated on Tuesday, May 18, 2004

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