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Hallelujah! The Pocket PC Emulator Is Alive Again!
26 April 2005 in Code-ing & Pocket PC | Comments enabled

I’ve been having hard times getting the Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition Pocket PC emulators (and all other versions) working in Visual Studio .NET 2003. I tried my usual remedy of uninstalling “Smart devices support” from both VB.net and C# and restarting, then reinstalling the support — but this time that didn’t solve my problem:

One or more files from the Emulator for Windows CE installation is missing. Please reinstall Emulator for Windows CE and try again.

So, I did a Goo… uhum, I mean a search for the error message and found this:

Workaround: Go to “Device Manager” (Right-click on “My Computer”, select Properties->Hardware and press the “Device Manager” button) and check whether “Virtual PC Application Services” is installed under the System Devices group. If the driver is not installed, install it by running “\CompactFrameworkSDK\ConnectionManager\Bin\DriverInstall\Smart Devices Emulator.msi”.

I tried it, and lo-and-behold it works instantly! A big thanks goes out to the Open NETCF Wiki where I found the solution!