Thursday, November 23, 2006

Debugging Compact Framework Apps on Vista

My trials and tribulations developing on Vista continues. As you may or may not know, Vista has a standard applet called "Windows Mobile Device Center" (another great name from the MS marketing department who get paid per word), instead of Active Sync.

This is great for Joe Schmuck who wants to plug in their Pocket PC or whatever. However if you are a developer like me it is a PITA. Visual Studio 2005 expects to see Active Sync, so when you try to debug/deploy it cant find AS so it throws a wobbly. A 30 minute intensive trawl on Google found the solution so here goes:

Basically because VS wants Active Sync, we must trick it into thinking it is still there. So open RegEdit and go to "HKLM | SOFTWARE | Microsoft | Windows CE Services".

If there is a key in there called MajorVersion, change it to 4 (mine was 6) and MinorVersion to 0. If they aren't there add them - they are DWORDS.

Restart VS and Roberts your mothers brother you should be able to deploy/debug to your PPC device.

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