CE .NET and Platform Builder 4.2

I have to admit that I like Visual Studio 2003 and Windows CE .NET (Platform Builder 4.2). There is a lot of good documentation and for the most part I've been able to start working on CE .NET projects fairly quickly. Oh, wait, except for a couple annoying little bugs. In order to (more easily) develop a .NET application for a CE device, one way to deploy the in-development application is with the SDAuthUtil application. Since I'm working with the emulator at the moment, this seemed like a relatively straight forward method: deploy the utility to the running CE OS(if it's not built into the image), run it, then run the counterpart on the development machine.

Heaven forbid you should shut down the Remote File Viewer after shutting down the emulator, though, because that will leave the process running. Even if you are able to close the viewer, you will be left with a few processes that will either prevent the viewer from being started again, or prevent the debugger from connecting to the emulator, and thus keep the OS from launching through Platform Builder. If after shutting down platform builder, the emulator, and the viewer (if you haven't killed the process), you would still see processes be cemg.exe, cepb.exe, and PBEMUL~1 in task manager. Time to kill those bad boys, too.

I came across this problem because I was having another problem. I had installed the beta of Windows CE .NET, then uninstalled it to install the final copy, except forgot to completely read the 148K release notes, in which it is mentioned that it is necessary to remove some registry keys and devices for the emulator even after uninstalling the product. I don't know for certain, but I believe this was the cause of my primary woe: I could configure the CE device for an outbound-only NAT connection, but not a fixed IP (at which point it picks of its own IP through a DHCP server, if so configured).

Round and round I went, and could only find information about uninstalling, removing the devices that aren't uninstalled, and then re-installing the product. Except, I'm one of the lucky few who run into the 21337 error, which means a double-install; install with the error, then repair the install. This isn't as straightforward as it sounds, though, because I may or may not have to reboot after the first install, and then, according to the various release notes and technical documents, I may have to repair the installation multiple times until I don't get the error. And, I have. Apparently, all of this was done to get the Virtual PC Emulated Switch driver, which now that I think about it, I didn't have the first time.

Now, I have several gigabytes of test CE builds from trying to figure out if I was missing a key networking module. Since I couldn't access the running emulation from my local network, I couldn't use SDAuthUtil, and therefore I couldn't test my CE app from Visual Studio 2003 (I could build then deploy it through the remote file viewer, but what a long way around). Apparently it was a product installation issue on both machines I attempted a product installation. At present, and after one more installation on Windows 2000, it works. After several installations and uninstallations, plus several repairs ending without error, the networking issues persist on a Windows XP machine. I can only assume it is still related to the Switch driver.

So let that be a lesson, or something.