David McNamee noticed that the emulator in VS 2005 now works from within Virtual PC.  Yup!  Also check out the much improved rotation capabilties... hopefully this will put an end to the requests that we include a licensed chiropractor with every download of the 2003 Second Edition Developer Resource Kit.

But wait - there's more!  What David noticed isn't that the VSD team has improved on the existing emulator to solve these common customer complaints.  They've actually gone much farther by creating a brand new emulator.  In the past, our emulators have been running special versions of Windows Mobile compiled for x86 - which meant that developers had to compile apps once for x86 to debug in the emulator and then again for ARM to use on an actual device.  What you see in VS 2005 is a true device emulator that runs the ARM version of Windows Mobile and ARM versions of your app.  This is a huge step forward in eliminating differences between device and emulator and the headaches caused by those subtleties.  The other really cool thing about this is that you can now install and run software from 3rd parties in the emulator (not previously possible unless you convinced the developer to release/support the x86 version of their app).

Check it out and send in that feedback.

[Author: Robert Levy]