I have a Windows CE 5.0-based Platform Builder image. It is intended to be installed on Visual Studio 2005. My team would like to upgrade our build tools to utilize Visual Studio 2012, but Visual Studio 2012 does not support this platform image.
To be clear; I am not asking whether or not Visual Studio 2012 (or higher) supports Platform Builder SDKs targeting Windows CE 5.0. That question has already been answered (more or less), and the answer is clearly "No."
Instead, what I'd like to do is install the Platform Builder SDK, and manually modify the Visual Studio 2012 environment to allow compilation of my Windows CE code. Features like remote debugging and deployment are acceptable losses to my team; we have our own pathway for deployment and debugging on our embedded device. What I'm really hoping to gain is simply the ability to build WinCE 5.0 code in VS2012, which was intended for VS2005. I am attempting to reduce the number of Visual Studio installations, and get access to the superior intellisense faculties of newer versions of Visual Studio.
Does anyone know if this is possible? How would I go about doing that?
There does not appear to be a way to do this, in such a fashion as to no longer require Visual Studio 2005.
You can, however, use registry hacks to force Visual Studio 2012 to build a WinCE 5.0 project by utilizing the compiler binaries from Visual Studio 2005, during compilation. This would allow you to develop code in VS2012, but would also require that VS2005 be installed for a successful build.