The following is the first of 2 installments that describe how I use Windows Mobile Device Emulators. This installment covers setup and basic use while the second installment covers configuration.

A lot of people test and demo Windows Mobile devices using actual devices. This works fine for most scenarios. However, there are some distinct advantages to using device emulators:

  • The device emulators are free as they come with the Windows Mobile SDKs.
  • If you use a device emulator for your demo, you don’t need to use an Elmo overhead projector to show what’s happening on the device.
  • You can pre-configure a device emulator, save the pre-configured state and quickly “reset” the emulator back to the pre-configured state. This is a real time saver for both demoing and testing.
  • You can test across multiple versions of the Windows Mobile Operating System simultaneously on one PC

If I’ve convinced you that the device emulator is worth setting up, follow these steps.

First, install the various Windows Mobile SDKs which include the device emulator images you will need to use:

Next, you will need the Device Emulator Manager which comes integrated in Visual Studio (go to Tools → Device Emulator Manager). If you don’t have Visual Studio, you can download the standalone Device Emulator Manager from the same download location as the MSFP Emulators.

Now, open the Device Emulator Manager which will show all the emulator images you’ve installed (see below).

Device Emulator Manager

Note that the MSFP images do not automatically show up in the device emulator manager like all of the other emulator images. MSFP images only show up after they are opened from the start menu (Start → “Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0 MSFP Emulator Images”). Once the MSFP image is opened, it shows up in the “other” branch as an image GUID. You may need to click the “refresh” button after the image is open to see it as shown below.

Now, open the image by “connecting” to it. Right-click the image and select “connect”. This will open the emulator in it’s own window. Notice that you can open many emulators all it once by repeating the connect process for all of them.

You can connect the emulator to desktop activesync or WMDC if you want. I recommend avoiding it, if possible. ActiveSync connections can muck with work/internet settings and will automatically configure a proxy setting which may not be correct. For instance, our proxy uses an outbound port of 8080 for HTTP traffic and ActiveSync configures use of port 80 which does not work. But, there are some tasks that require use of ActiveSync. To do it, you need to set Connection Settings to support a “DMA” connection type:To initiate the activesync connection, right-click on the image in the device emulator manager and select “cradle”. Check back for installment 2 that will discuss the device emulator configuration that I use for testing.

WMDC Connection Settings for Device Emulator

To initiate the activesync connection, right-click on the image in the device emulator manager and select “cradle”. Check back for installment 2 that will discuss the device emulator configuration that I use for testing.

UPDATED: Installment 2 has now been posted.

Dave Field, CISSP, MCP
Device Managment and Security Architect
Enterprise Mobile, Inc.