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.

MS Bugs - You mean they exist?

I have had the pleasure of playing with Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 to try a little Windows Mobile 6 development. This has been a great opportunity to learn more of C# and I have to admit that while I am learning .NET as I go, I am coming up to speed quite quickly. I decided the other night to provide some local storage for some of the values I am retrieving from my server. Microsoft provides a really light-weight version of their SQLServer which runs on the mobile platforms called SqlCe and I have been quite impressed with it so far. I read/watched some of the "How do I?" videos provided on the MSDN website and started using SqlCeResultSets. I wrote a simple loop in my code similiar to the following:

   ...
   SqlCeResultSet resultSet = _sqlController.getResultSet(ResultSetType.COUNTRIES);
   if (resultSet.HasRows)
   {
      foreach (SqlCeUpdatableRecord record in resultSet)
      {
          // do something with the result
      }
   }

However, evertime it hit the foreach statement the program would terminate. I suspected this was an infinite loop or some other issue. Well it turns out that indeed there is a bug in .NET 3.5 which causes the ResultSet to enter an infinite loop when the GetEnumerable( ) is called. An interesting article that outlines this is located Jim Wilson's Blog. Fortunately this issue only cost me a few minutes, but I was glad to see that this was a Microsoft issue and not my beginner C# programming skills at fault.

Smartphone Connectivity in Visual Studio 2008

Hooking up Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and using the network on an emulated smartphone is a rather tricky business if you are not familiar with the procedure. Fortunately, a very good blog exists to capture this information at: Akhune's Weblog. The limitation of this of course is that you can not have your mobile device AND the emulator both connected to ActiveSync at the same time.

An Update (05/23/2008): Having used the emulator a little more, I think the key point that is often lost is the usage of the "cradle" option to dock the emulator with ActiveSync. Once you get in the habit of doing this per development session, you will find it is much easier. Also, I have not had very good results of having both my Smartphone and the Emulator cradled simultaneous and recommend using one or the other. This appears to be a pretty common issue.