…it took some effort but this evening it finally worked.
This morning I first deinstalled VS2005 on my Win2000 machine, better start with a “clean” situation. Removed the rest of the components installed with VS2005 as well and installed everything again. At first the emulators wouldn’t start but after installing the Device Emulator Patch, I could at least start the emulator… first hurdle taken… that was done by the end of the afternoon.
Now getting the emulator connected to the internet through the host machine. As I found out, others had already faced the challenge and had overcome the hurdle. But don’t try to find these solutions using Google, look directly on the VS2005 forums which has a whole section dedicated to emulator problems. I followed some of the tips and tricks I found there, which included getting my emulator connected to my machine using ActiveSync (if you think about it it’s a logical thing because it’s the same way you can connect a real 3D PocketPC to the internet using another host machine) and configuring some connection settings in the emulated PocketPC. I first used the IE on the PocketPC to see whether it worked by just trying to open a webpage… second hurdle taken.
Once I got these first basics in place, I made a really basic application using a library called RSS.NET which contains classes for reading rss feeds into collections. I deployed it on the emulator without any serious deployment errors but I still get the message “The operation could not be completed. Unspecified error”. At first I thought it didn’t work at all, but browsing in the Program Files folder on the emulator, I did find my application… and it worked… third hurdle taken.
This way debugging doesn’t work so that’s one still to overcome, but now at least I can get started…