Me, Myself and My Blog. : Visual Studio for Devices

Getting some reports of IE8 Beta with Smart Device Projects

Amit Chopra — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:38:00 GMT

A couple of customer pinged me recently that when they create a new Smart Device Native Project in VS 2008, the dialog comes and goes away and nothing really happens. On futher investigation it appears that installing IE8 Beta cause this.

I don't have a work around to share at this point (other than un-installing IE8) but as soon as I have something additional to share, I'll update this post with a workaround.

Amit Chopra

Jan 29, 2008 ** Verified that the Release Candidate of IE 8 does not cause any issues **

March 26th 2009 - Hmm not good. THis is back again, please give us some time to get this taken care of. Working with desktop C++ and IE Team to get a fix/workaround out asap.

TechMela

Amit Chopra — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 12:29:00 GMT

TechMela is quite an interesting name. Mela means a fair in Hindi. The folks at India have done a fantastic job at bring a bunch of events under one roof and a new branding called TechMela.

There will be 4 sessions that the Visual Studio for Device team will be presenting.

Device Emulator for Mobile Application Developers by Mukund Bhoovaraghavan
New and Improved .NET Compact Framework Diagnostic Tools by Srinivas Nadimpalli
What's New for Device Developers in Visual Studio "Orcas" by Aarthi Ramamurthy
Using LINQ with the .NET Compact Framework by Manav Gaur.

I'll just hang around this time I guess as I didn't sign up for any talks.

If you are planning to come to TechMela and would like to chat about Windows Mobile Device Development with Visual Studio, or have suggestions and concerns to share, drop me a note and/or find me at the event and I would love to sync up. And what you share with me about VSD, I promise to deliver all your feedback back to the team.

See you at TechMela !

Amit Chopra

Take a tour of the offices of the Visual Studio for Device Team

Amit Chopra — Sat, 25 Sep 2004 18:55:00 GMT

A great way to know what our team has been upto http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=23841

eMbedded Visual C++ 4.0 SP4 is now available !

Amit Chopra — Mon, 26 Jul 2004 20:57:00 GMT

I am pleased to announce that last week our team signed off on the Service Pack 4 (SP4) release of eMbedded Visual C++ 4.0. It is available on the web at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4A4ED1F4-91D3-4DBE-986E-A812984318E5&displaylang=en

The primary reason for this release was to enable development support for Windows CE 5.0 based devices.

Service Pack 4 is a fully cumulative and hence allows a development machine to target all CE platforms since Windows CE 4.0.

Just like SP3, SP4 will install on base eVC 4.0 and/or any exisiting Service Pack of eVC. An online version of the release notes are also published on this site , please review these prior to upgrade.

Amit Chopra

Troubleshooting Device Emulator setup in Visual Studio 2005 Beta 1

Amit Chopra — Wed, 07 Jul 2004 17:30:00 GMT

Here is some information that will be useful for those who get a failure message during setup of the Device Emulator in the Beta 1 release of Visual Studio 2005.

NOTE:If you did run into this issue please make sure you log a bug on the product feedback center so that we can track how many people ran into this issue at some point.

The messages would look similar to

Microsoft Device Emulator version 1.0: [2] Error Code 1603 for this component means “Fatal Error during Installation”

Or Microsoft Device Emulator version 1.0: [2] Setup failed on component Microsoft Device Emulator version 1.0

Or The installer has encountered an unexpected error when installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 29999.

Or Failed to Open VPC Network Driver When starting the Device Emulator .

Some back ground on this component.

You would have noticed this new component listed in the feature tree during setup. This feature currently installs the Virtual Machine Network services that are used by the Microsoft Device Emulator. If these services don’t get installed then the Visual Studio IDE is not able to correctly communicate with the emulators.

Why a failed setup?

This list may not be exhaustive however there are two common scenarios when the driver fails to install.

a) if there was an older version of the driver on that machine that it could not upgraded (example if you had eVC 4.0 SP2 on the machine)

b) if the property page for the network connections was open during setup.

Other scenarios include intermittent problems with network causing this service to fail when installing.

Troubleshooting these issues

My first recommendation is to reboot the machine. This fixes a flag set during the removal of the previous version of the driver which causes the upgrade to the newer version to fail.
Then check to see if you have these services installed.
1. Go to Start and the Control Panel
2. Open Network Connections
3. Select the properties of Local Area Connection by right clicking on it and selecting properties
4. You will be able to see (or not see) this service listed for this connection.
if these services are not installed,
1. Start the IDE and create a new Smart Devices Project (say a Pocket PC Project)
2. Press F5
3. From the deploy dialog select (Legacy) Emulator

You will see a dialog indicating the installation the Emulator and the driver.

If no error happens during the installation, this installation dialog will go away and the driver gets installs

Verify once again as in step1 to check that the driver is correctly installed

The version we ship in Beta is 2.5.452.0

Once this driver is installed all scenario will work as expected.

Also a note to anyone who is trying to install this, you need to be an admin on the machine to install this driver, other wise the service will not install.

I Hope this information was useful in fixing failed driver setup issues. I will keep this page updated with other issues and workaround for driver setup.

Amit Chopra

How to pass on feedback (bugs and suggestions) on the Visual Studio 2005 Beta for Device Development

Amit Chopra — Wed, 30 Jun 2004 17:31:00 GMT

The MSDN Product Feedback Center is a public suggestion and bug database for Microsoft products, starting with Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 Beta. Developers can track suggestions and bug reports online, get email notification of fixes, and interact directly with Microsoft product teams during product development. Leveraging the collective experience of the developer community, the site enables developers to stay productive by avoiding known problems, sharing workarounds, and voting on existing feedback, in addition to filing new reports.

http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback

For issue related to device development in VS 2005 Beta, under product and technologies list select “Smart Devices” and under that you can select the most relevant category for your suggestion or bugs.

Thanks

Amit Chopra

What's new in Smart Device Development in VS 2005

Amit Chopra — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 20:22:00 GMT

I wrote up a small document which highlights some of the enhancements and and new features in Smart devices development in Visual Studio 2005.

You can view this on http://msdn.microsoft.com/vs2005/teams/devices/whatsnew/default.aspx

Would love to hear what you think !

Thanks

Amit Chopra

Newsgroups for VS 2005 for Smart Devices (Native)

Amit Chopra — Fri, 11 Jun 2004 16:28:00 GMT

We now have a dedicated newsgroup for dicussions around Native Device development in VS 2005.

The newsgroup is microsoft.private.whidbey.smartdevices.cplusplus

Instructions on how to get to this newsgroup are available on the Visual Studio 2005 Developer Center

Amit Chopra

Have you run into corrupted or missing .CAB files with the Tech Preview drop ?

Amit Chopra — Thu, 06 May 2004 17:39:00 GMT

I saw a few posts complaing about missing or corrupted CABs. Here is some information that would help you diagnose what the issues is.

For the corrupted cab’s I would suggest you should locate the file on the CD/DVD and then open the CAB file with explorer (double click on the cab) and select all the files and then Copy to Folder (under edit) to a tempory directory on the local machine. If it fails then the CD/DVD/install source likely is bad.

For Missing cab’s errors manually verify that the file is actually missing from the source location. If the file is actually there, try the above method to verify it’s not corrupted.

Then copy all the files from CD to the Local machine (there are instructions located on disk1 readme.htm) and then try setup again.

If setup it fails with a missing or corrupted cab message I would find the VS Setup log files in the %temp% directory and you may mail me a copy of them to have diagnosed by our setup team (achopra@Microsoft.com). We may not be able to give you an immediate fix but we could at least address some of these issue with the future drops.

Some reports we’ve been seeing regarding corrupted\missing cabs have been mostly due to either a bad CD, or download, or the customer using Virtual CD feature in Virtual PC to install VS (there been reports of issues with Virtual CD and VS ISO’s.)

Thanks
Amit Chopra

VS 2005 March Tech Preview Device Emulator Images

Amit Chopra — Fri, 16 Apr 2004 18:55:00 GMT

I just noticed an issue with emulator images loading in the Device emulator showing an expiration message. Watch this space, when I get the new images available for download, I will put the link here.

Sorry about the inconvinience.

Amit

Thanks for coming to the MDC 2004

Amit Chopra — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 15:56:00 GMT

Thanks to everyone who came to the MDC event and I hope you found it as time well spent. I personally was very excited to have an oppertunity meet with many of you first hand and listen to your feedback and questions, and also showcase some of our new and exciting features in VS 2005.

Given that I have started to see a trickle of questions on the various whidbey newsgroups, I am assuming some of you have already installed the tech preview CDs and are playing around with the new bits.

Here is something I would love to hear from you. Is there anything we could have done better or differenly (at our booths or labs) ? Anything you specifically liked or disliked ?. I will consolidate and pass this feedback on to our organisors and to my team as appropriate.

Thanks

Amit Chopra

First Day at MDC

Amit Chopra — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 15:43:00 GMT

It was really exciting to see all the momentum around Mobile Development and specially around the next version of VS and NET CF. The most common questions I got at the booth was - where are the DVDs? I think the DVDs missed the 'in-the-bag' deadline so they should be coming tomorrow (3/25). I talked to a few people to determine how they will get them. It appears that the CDs will be made available during the Keynote session on Thursday.

I also heard a lot of people (specially those who had just started doing mobile development) feel confused about differences in Windows Mobile vs. PPC 2003 vs. Windows CE .NET. I'll post a blog on this when I back in office next week.

Hope everyone is having a great time at the conference. Swing by to the .NET CF and Mobile booth and talk to a number of us from the product groups who will be happy to answer your questions around Mobile development, .NET CF and Visual Studio .NET

Amit Chopra

Enter the Mobile2Market Application Contest

Amit Chopra — Mon, 15 Mar 2004 01:41:00 GMT

4 Grand Prizes, 20 Finalists: Submit your applications for Windows Mobile-based Pocket PCs and Smartphones to the Mobile2Market Application Contest and you could earn US $25,000 and application distribution. In addition, five finalists in each category receive featured promotions through Mobile2Market.

http://www.mobile2market.com/contest/index.asp?s=PRMSA

Amit