Ever since I was given this laptop at work, I've avoided installing Visual Studio or any other development tools on here - I've been more than able to do everything I need using Microsoft Virtual PC virtual machines. Now I think I may have finally found the limitation that forces me to have to install VS 2003 on my laptop... here's why:
- Using a VM with VS 2003 installed, install the PocketPC 2003 SDK, and the 2003SE emulators, just to get you up to date with the latest emulator images.
- Create a new Smart Device project - a simple PocketPC app will do. On the clean form surface, drag a textbox, a button and a label.
- Double-click the button - this is a "hello world" level of example, so just set the label's Text property to the textbox's Text property when the click event fires.
- Now for the fun - try to run the project!
If all goes as it did for me, you should see the most fabulous error message:
Emulator for Windows CE will not run within another copy of Emulator for Windows CE.
You just had to try, didn't you?
So, because emulators act like VPC images (the latest ones actually are VPC images, apparently), there seems to be no way to develop mobile applications within a VM! Still, that is a fabulous error message. It's actually listed on the Easter Egg site!
Of course, if anyone out there knows different, please let me know - this sort of information could be made clearer on the MS site, to be honest. I'm sure I'm not the only VPC dev fan. Peter Provost seems to have got the same error as me, but no obvious resolution. However, David McNamee seems to have got it working with VS 2005... which is all very well, but I need to use 2003.
With no other obvious solutions, I may end up installing VS on my laptop later :(