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VS2005 device emulator issues

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I was getting an error when trying to connect to an emulator on VS2005 that prevented me from using VS2005 without using an actual device for debugging.  What a pain.

Anyway, whenever I was trying to connect to a emulator image, I got an error: "Connection Failed.  The configuration data for this product is corrupt. Contact your support personel".  Once again, I find that I am my support personel :-)

I haven't figured out how to fix it, but I found a work around to the problem.

Firstly, you can connect to any of the emulator images on your machine from the command line.  On my computer the emulator engine is located in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Device Emulator\1.0.  So I dropped to a command prompt and went to that directory.

The emulator images are all .bin files.  You can search for them by *.bin.  You'll probably find (as I did) that they are in several locations.

I didn't bother trying to rationalize mine (feel free to try and let me know how you go), but I just loaded one of the images I found - specifically the Pocket PC 2003 SE Image.  To do this, I typed the following on the command line.

deviceemulator "c:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SmartDevices\Emulators\Images\PocketPC\2003\1033\PPC_2003_SE_WWE_ARMv4.bin"

This started the emulator with the specified image.  You might have to wait for a few seconds for the emulator to start - feel free to tweak it with a reset :-)

Once running you can start the Device Emulator Manager and see the image you just loaded at the bottom of the list of devices.  Mine had a GUID name.  Once it appears in the list you can set it up for a cradle sync using device manager and work away.

I hope this is helpful to someone else who gets this problem :-)

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 28, 2005
    I didn't..
  • Anonymous
    September 28, 2005
    I had a lot of problems with the emulator to start with, but after carefully removing all traces of previous versions of VS2005, installing the ActiveSync 4 beta (when are they going to release that thing?) and most crucially, applying the DMA patch, I was able to get the emulator happily cradled without any extra fiddling (I'm shortening the story a bit - the last few steps involved a lot of patient advice from people in the devices team).
    You could check out this post: http://www.dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/kevdaly/archive/2005/06/16/124234.aspx ... and the preceding one to see if anything rings a bell.
    I'm very enthusiastic about the VS 2005 emulator (if I were a Microsoft employee I'd no doubt say I was super-excited about it :-) )...if you have the Windows Mobile 5 SDK installed (which I recommend) it's also a good way to learn your way around the new OS without actually having a device (I've pretty much decided that there's an HTC universal/JASJAR in my future - I'm going for the biggy since I'm more of a PDA person than a phone person but need a bit of both - and I'm prepared to take the speed penalty moving away from EVDO since I'm going to be trying very hard to get another job in Europe)
  • Anonymous
    September 29, 2005
    If you're running Visual Studio Beta 2, you MUST apply the DMA patch to enable reliable connectivity to your emulator. If you're using a build later than Beta 2 you don't need it, but if you didn't have a clean uninstall of Beta 2 (which is sadly quite easy to have happen) you'll still have files lying around that tell the emulator to connect using TCP, not DMA.

    To clear out any bad mojo after Beta 2 was on your machine you can go to c:documents and settings<username>local settingsmicrosoftcorecon. I'm pretty sure I got this path slightly wrong, but just search for the corecon directory under your username's local settings and delete the whole corecon directory. This will reset all the emulator settings to the default when you next launch Visual Studio, and will ensure you're using the DMA transport in a post-Beta 2 build.

    Hope this makes sense...

    Neil
    (neile@microsoft.com)