In developing software for the Pocket PC platform, I have been happily using the Pocket PC emulator that Microsoft provides with Visual Studio (and as a free download). It provides for much faster develop/deploy/test cycles. (Of course, I do still final testing on real hardware). I have also found that providing the emulator to other folks in the office (e.g. the documentation team) allows them to get accurate screen shots with little effort. So, I'm convinced this is a great tool for my situation.
Here's the concern:
In order to use the networking capabilities of the emulator, one must install Microsoft Virtual PC on the machine that will run the emulator. This seems like an awful heavyweight requirement for such a small tool. Has anyone found a simpler way to enable networking functionality on the Pocket PC emulator?
It's possible to extract the driver required for the Emulator from the Virtual PC 2007 setup file. For Windows 7 users that have Windows Virtual PC installed, this is actually the only known way to get the Emulator working in a network environment (since installing Virtual PC 2007 is not an option once Windows Virtual PC has been installed).
Here's the blog post explaining the procedure. In a nutshell, you extract the VMNetSrv driver from the Virtual PC 2007 SP1 setup file and then manually install this driver on the network adapter you use for Internet connectivity:
BrianPeek.com: Windows Virtual PC and the Microsoft Device Emulator
Simple answer is no, but...
Have you considered using Microsoft's free remote display control from power toys and running your app across ActiveSync. This means that you are using the actual hardware, network comms and all, but with screen, keyboard and mouse reflected to the screen. I find it works a treat.
We went event a step further. We create a solution for building against compact framework and one solution for building against the win32 .net framework. As all code is just C#, there shouldn't be any problems compiling and running the application as Win32 application on the PC.
There is another great benefit - it's much faster to compile for Win32 than for WinCE.
Hope this helps...
Related
We have a system that includes a small PC with a website (developped in ASP.net 3.5 using VS 2010) and a SQL database, and some Windows CE 5.0 smart devices (running a homemade WinForm Compact Framework 2.0 software). Those systems are installed to many customers across the country.
Now, I need to be able to automatically update the website and the CE application remotely.
I developped a program that runs on the small PC and retrieve the files (by FTP) to be updated from a WebService in our office. The program executes the database scripts and copy the file to its intended destination locally.
Question: can we "packaged" the website to be deploy remotely? Having to copy every files to the remote PC is very cumbersome and not efficient.
Also: How can I update the software running on the smart device? IP addresses are unknown, they needs be on the DHCP without IP reservation, as we need to be able to hot-swap any devices without doing any configuration.
thanks a lot for your time and help
For both scenarios, the de-centrailized PC servers and the Windows Mobile clients you should consider a Remote Management System.
There is normally no way to push a file onto a windows mobile device, except for having an 'agent' running on the devices (i.e. a ftp server, or a Mobile Device Management Agent (ie by SOTI MobiControl or others).
You may provide a link to a CAB file (a windows mobile installation package) either on the remote servers or better on one central server) and let the users pick that by clicking it in a HTML page.
Are all the Windows Mobile devices by the same vendor and are the same models? Some industrial devices have software agents pre-installed. Some industrial devices also support download/setup via scanning a barcode.
I am developing an application that needs to communicate with a Mobile Operator Messaging Center via CIMD2 protocol. I am trying to find something that has already been implemented, but the only solutions I can find cost around 1000$ US. Can anyone suggest anything?
I found that there is a Linux based program http://www.kannel.org/, and people run it on a linux box and communicate with it from .NET on a Windows box. (might run the linux box on a virtual machine).
You might also want to port the code to C# (there is a JAVA port out there).
I use Mac as my primary OS, but I often work on ASP.NET MVC projects. I want to use the same file system for them, and not virtual OS image.
The reason for that is because I want to integrate the projects with Mac OS (i.e. upload them to the server via Transmit, a Mac OS FTP app).
But the problem here is that ASP.NET can't really work with projects located on network drives. So when I try to run a site (either with VS 2010's built in web server or with IIS 7), I get
Error Summary HTTP Error 500.19 -
Internal Server Error The requested
page cannot be accessed because the
related configuration data for the
page is invalid.
And this is a common mistake but no solution that I could find worked for me.
If I create a project on Parallel's virtual C:\ drive, everything works fine.
P.S. I hear that VMWare has better network drives support, but is it as smooth as Parallels? Parallels 6 runs extremely fast for me, and my Mac Mini doesn't even get warm with VS 2010 and several other Mac apps open.
P.P.S. I also heard about using DropBox and/or Windows Live Mesh. Is clouding a good idea in this case?
Thank you
You're creating an awful lot of pain for yourself if you want to do all this this just because you want to use a Mac FTP client to deploy your sites/applications.
Visual Studio 2010 contains Publishing tools which make deployment much easier (and are smarter) than just ftp. I suggest you have a play with them and then see if you still want to go down this dark, bumpy and dangerous path :-)
I have as asp.net webserver that I hosted and I went to my mobile application I am building and made a web reference to it.
So it finds it and stuff and now I can access the web methods because of the wsdl generated. However when it tries to connect I get this:
Could not establish connection to network.
So do I have to enable something to make this work?
Take a look at this article. It explains how to setup your mobile device for internet connectivity.
Windows Mobile Emulator and Internet Connectivity
It's been awhile since i have had to do this. Perhaps it is as easy as Matt has suggested, I can remember having a hard time making this work with Windows Vista, Visual Studio 2005 and the Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC Emulator. I've found a couple more articles, hope this helps.
HOWTO: Configure Network in Windows Mobile / PocketPC Device Emulator
Making Emulator to connect to the Network
I have used web services and rest based services via webrequests on the emulator without needing to configure the NE2000 adapters.
Change activesync or WMDC to connect using DMA (in wmdc: mobile device settings | connection settings, then set 'allow connections to one of the following' to DMA)
Then in VS2008, under tools select device emulator manager, and pick the emulator that is running, right click on it and select cradle, this should connect activesync/wmdc to the emulator and provide a network connection that is sufficient to communicate over http with web services.
No, no, I'm not getting hives ;).
I am able to run a local version of my .NET 3.5 site on IIS and troubleshoot whilst I develop. However, my flash developer is forced to log onto our Windows 2003 and mess with our staging server when he wants to see how his work is doing. This is unacceptable, I understand, but right now there are time concerns so this hack is going to have to fly for a little.
How do I set up a dev environment for my flash developer to be able to work on his local machine? I'm sure this gets done in other places.
VMWare Fusion or Parallels, or give him a virtual machine/PC that he can Remote Desktop to from his Mac.
Not to sound the fool, but isn't Flash not platform dependent? Is the flash developer doing anything more complex than connecting to a remote client to update an .swf file? You don't "need" to be running windows/iis to copy a file from mac to windows. You might try the Remote Desktop client:
http://www.microsoft.com/mac/products/remote-desktop/default.mspx
or set up an FTP account (on the staging server in question?) for him. I agree with the above about using Parallels or VMWare. It's not necessarily a "hack" or "workaround" that you can use and test on multiple platforms. It's a huge plus! As a user of VMWare and ex-parallels user, I recommend VMWare. It takes about as long as "installing windows" to be up and running on a mac, and the resources from your Mac can be available via a "documents" on the desktop (or other) if you so choose.
What kind of Mac is it? The Intel ones can run Windows natively.
Dual boot Windows on his Mac with Boot Camp?
Setup IIS in a VMWare Fusion virtual machine. Do a simplified install of Windows XP and it should run excellent.
That way you can interface with the IIS Server from Mac OS X or from other PC's from anywhere on the local network for that matter.
I use Vmware Fusion to run subversion and Apache servers and it runs beautifully.
well an alternative is the Q Emulator
What is the actual problem? As I see it, Flash dev. makes a Flash movie, and tests it locally, if it needs to communicate with the server, it does just that. If the Flash dev. wants to see it in a page, or see how it communicates with the surrounding HTML and Javascript, he uploads the file to the server using a ordinary windows share (aka Samba-share) or FTP or whathaveyou and then presto, it works.
I've just discovered http://www.virtualbox.org">VirtualBox which is a free alternative to Parallels and Bootcamp. I'm running Windows XP pro on my MacBook no problem at all - note it's for Intel Macs only though.