In developing software for the Pocket PC platform, I have been happily using the Pocket PC emulator that Microsoft provides with Visual Studio (and as a free download). It provides for much faster develop/deploy/test cycles. (Of course, I do still final testing on real hardware). I have also found that providing the emulator to other folks in the office (e.g. the documentation team) allows them to get accurate screen shots with little effort. So, I'm convinced this is a great tool for my situation.
Here's the concern: In order to use the networking capabilities of the emulator, one must install Microsoft Virtual PC on the machine that will run the emulator. This seems like an awful heavyweight requirement for such a small tool. Has anyone found a simpler way to enable networking functionality on the Pocket PC emulator?
It's possible to extract the driver required for the Emulator from the Virtual PC 2007 setup file. For Windows 7 users that have Windows Virtual PC installed, this is actually the only known way to get the Emulator working in a network environment (since installing Virtual PC 2007 is not an option once Windows Virtual PC has been installed).
Here's the blog post explaining the procedure. In a nutshell, you extract the VMNetSrv driver from the Virtual PC 2007 SP1 setup file and then manually install this driver on the network adapter you use for Internet connectivity: