the required ActiveSync proxy ports are not registered

Tue, November 28, 2006, 09:42 AM under MobileAndEmbedded
In the presentation to students that I mentioned here, I thought it was essential to show the smart device project deploy to the actual device (rather than the emulator that I use almost exclusively nowadays) since for newbies to the dev experience, I think it adds a lot of value to see that "this stuff is real".

When prepping for the event I realised that deploying to the device (and not the emulator) was broken on Vista! The error shown in the Error List was:
the required ActiveSync proxy ports are not registered
...this came from the Device Connectivity Component

I had heard the rumour that there are issues with VS2005 development on Vista but other than the one I talked about here, I had never faced *any* issues so this was a first for me! Luckily someone from the VSD team was able to give me a virtual slap and remind me that I should dogfood the workarounds we give to the public: Run VS2005 elevated – doh! I have never had to do that to date... Luckily I received this advice before my presentation earlier today :-)

Blogging this in case anyone else faces this issue (surprisingly no search results for the error above). If you are running WMDC on Vista RTM with VS2005 (without SP1) and you get the error above, run VS elevated (right click and select “Run as administrator”) and the issue goes away... phew!

For other device development issues on Vista see the relevant VSD blog entry.