CE 6.0 on Vista.

Since I had a couple of hours to burn on Monday evening waiting for the snow bound traffic to clear I decided to pave my laptop hard drive, install Vista and all of my usual development tools - including Visual Studio 2005, Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Beta, Windows Embedded CE 6.0, and the Virtual Machine Network Driver for Microsoft Device Emulator (and of course install the Windows XP Embedded development tools!).

Here's what I've found so far...

Visual Studio installed on Vista without any issues (note that you should probably disable the SQL Express install if you are planning on installing Windows XP Embedded at a later date).

Visual Studio 2005 SP1 Beta also installed without any issues - at this point I could create, build, and run a C# desktop applicaiton on Vista (woot!).

The CE 6.0 install also went smoothly - I chose to install the ARMV4I (so I get the Device Emulator) and x86 processors (so I can deploy to a ICOP eBox 2300 box).

So at this point I have everything needed to build, deploy, and debug a CE 6.0 operating system image - so what was the experience of running the tools on Vista ?

The first thing I wanted to do was build a Device Emulator image based on the PDA device configuration and included IPConfig, and HTTPD Web Server (ipconfig so I can get the IP address of the Device Emulator, and the Web Server so I can try to connect to the Device Emulator from my desktop).

The o/s image built without any errors and I was able to boot the emulator image (see below) - notice that the networking icon shows that the Emulator has a valid IP address.

Once the image booted I use "s ipconfig /d" to get the IP address of the emulator - and then use IE7 from Vista to browse to the emulator image - this also worked just fine (WootEx !)

Device Emulator build, download, debug, and remote tools (I used the Remote File Viewer and Remote Registry Editor) - all of this worked just fine.

I have a problem downloading to an x86 reference board which is using LoadCEPC and Eboot.bin to load an image from the network - this doesn't appear to work using the CE 5.0 bootloader [I've heard that eboot.bin needs to be updated], the board starts, I can see the "BOOTME", Platform Builder accepts the BootMe but the image doesn't download to the board - there are a number of known issues using CE 6.0 and Visual Studio 2005 on Vista - and for both of the products there are planned service packs that should fix the known Vista compat issues - I will post more information on the service packs as it becomes available.

Overall the experience for Device Emulator appears to work quite well.

- Mike