Visual Studio/Cradling Emulators and Your Device

It does not take long searching the Web to see that no one has had much luck cradling the device emulator when you have a device already attached to ActiveSync. Unfortuantely, if you are switching sync'd devices (between a device and an emulator) pretty soon Active Sync does not recognize the emulator at all. After fooling with this a little bit, I did discover a way to get it re-detected.

1. Cradle the emulator through the Emulator Manager. This of course will not be detected by ActiveSync.
2. Go to ActiveSync, and click on File->Connection Settings...
3. When the dialog appears, click on the Connect... button to bring up the connect dialog and click next which starts the polling step. Cancel the polling after a second.
4. You will see the Connection Settings... dialog become unresponsive (all grey - I guess they are performing code in the UI tread (interesting observation)), and after about 5 seconds hear the familiar "beep" and the emulator will become cradled.

This process has worked for me switching between the device (my HTC-8900) and my smartphone emulator. After performing this more than twenty times however it may not longer work, in which case either restarting ActiveSync (killing and restarting the process) or a reboot of the computer may be required. However typically I find this works ok for a normal development session of a few hours where you are mostly using the Emulator and every so often downloading to your device to ensure that it still works.