Switching Emulator Skins in Visual Studio 2003/eVC

The Windows Mobile guys got a question on their blog this morning about changing the skin on our current shipping emulators so they look like different devices. Here's what Larry had to say about it:

The emulator engine is actually included in eVC and Visual Studio .NET 2003 - when you install the SDK, you are installing additional emulator “images“ of the OS.

The Pocket PC 2003 SDK includes new skins, however by default, they will only be used when you load one of the “images“ from that SDK.

It is possible, (though not necessarily easy), to configure the loading of an emulator image to force a particular skin to load. It really hinges on exactly what you are attempting to do.

The skins themselves, for the PPC 2003 SDK, are stored in the “emulation“ subdirectory, which in a default installation will go to:

C:\Program Files\Windows CE Tools\wce420\POCKET PC 2003\Emulation

If you look at EMUL.CMD, you will see how you can launch the emulator engine to force a particular skin to load.

NOTE: you will only get the EMULATION directory if you install the SDK AFTER having installed eVC 4.0.... because it depends upon that installation for the emulator engine, (which does not ship in the SDK itself).

And now you know!

[Author: Neil Enns]