So you’ve gotten your toy all prepped and ready to rock.  Great.  You can test out the application on as I outlined on the physical device but the issue is as soon as you untether the device, BAM, the application exits.

For me and the mass amounts of rocking requires an install for my device, so how do we do that?  MSDN has a nice write up for deploying Windows Mobile applications but I’ll walk through my deployment for you too.

We’ll right click on the solution in the solution explorer or we can go to File->New->Project.  If you do the file menu route, you’ll have a screen that is slightly different than mine.  At the bottom you’ll have a drop down menu where you’ll want to change it from “Create a new solution” to “Add to Solution”.

Since I want a CAB install, I’ll go to the “Other Project Types” then to “Setup and Deployment” and select a Smart Device CAB Project”.

From there, right click on “Application Folder” and go to “Add”.  Select “Primary Output” and hit OK.

So with the output added in now, we’ll need to do some more magic.  In the “File System” window, we’ll right-click on “File System on Target Machine” and go “Add Special Folder” then to “Start Menu Folder”.

Now that we have our start menu, we’ll go back to the “Application Menu” and right click on the “Primary output from Cowbell”.  Select “Create Shortcut” and drag that shortcut to your start menu folder.  I suggest you rename it too.

Then you can build it, drag the CAB over and install on your device.

Excuse me while I go use my HTC Diamond as a cow bell now.