Connectivity issues after installing Visual Studio SP1

Issue:
Developers who upgraded to VS 2005 SP1 from VS 2005 RTM may have noticed issues in their connectivity. When they try to connect to device they will be getting one of the following error messages depending on whether you have ActiveSync installed in your machine or not.

- ActiveSync not installed

- Device is not ready

Reason:
In VS 2005 SP1 we did some bug fixes in conman2.dll (desktop side component) and conmanclient.exe (device side component). When you install SP1 both conman2.dll and conmanclient.exe (along with other binaries) get updated. If you have RTM version of conmanclient.exe running in your device then connection from desktop will fail (as the expected version of conmanclient.exe is not present in device).

If desktop component finds that conmanclient.exe is not of the same version it tries to shut it down, bootstrap the device (copy the device side binaries to device and start them). In case of WinCE devices (e.g. CEPC), bootstrap being manual, will try to use ActiveSync and fails with an error message if the device is not connected through ActiveSync.

In case of emulator saved states this won't be any problem. Desktop will be able to re-bootstrap the emulator using DMA bootstrap. Because of the extra bootstrap, time to connect to the emulator saved state will slightly increase.

How to solve this:

If you have wince device with RTM binaries (conmanclient.exe, CMAcept.exe) then replace them with the SP1 binaries. Then run conmanclient.exe and cmaccept.exe from device. Now try the connection from desktop.

In case of emulator, connect to the emulator once using SP1. Now the newer (SP1) binaries will be present in the emulator. Create a fresh saved state out of this.

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Anand R