More on Networking support for the Device Emulator
Many of you might have seen that the download for the virtual machine network driver, which was originally provided by the Device Emulator team, now points you to the Virtual PC 2007 download location.
A little while back I wrote a blog about getting networking support on the emulator by using Virtual PC 2007. I have since seen two kinds of questions comments on the forums and other people who originally saw the download for the virtual machine network driver.
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Why should I download the whole Virtual PC software to just enable networking on the emulator?
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Why has the original download been retired, when the driver was required to install Windows Mobile 5.0 MSFP images for Direct Push and Always-up-to-date support?
The simplest answer to this question is that Virtual PC is the officially supported product from Microsoft and customers who have installed this product have a direct support channel to Microsoft to ask questions. Virtual PC is supported on both x86 and x64 systems (provided you pick the correct installer :)) and also installs the virtual machine network driver. The Virtual PC team does not support the network driver as a standalone product. Furthermore, the driver install that was originally available was only the x86 version and couldn't be installed on x64 systems. Virtual PC is a small enough download and we hope that users are able to achieve their scenarios using this option.
I have also seen many people hitting into issues where they had installed the network driver but it is not working - device emulator not being able to recognize it. Virtual PC team has posted a blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2007/01/15/fixing-broken-virtual-networking.aspx which might help you if you run into a problem.
