The Moth

Remember the problem I got when trying to deploy to a real device from VS2005 on Vista? As that blog entry says, the solution was to run VS elevated once and that rectified the issue.

On an internal list I noticed someone else had a device issue on Vista this time with Platform Builder 6.0 and their error apparently was:
PB Debugger Warning: Debugger service map is set to none. If your image has debugging support it may not boot properly

...guess what the solution was again? Correct, run VS elevated once.

The other day at an offsite I did a very short intro to Windows Mobile development so I wanted to show first a small desktop app, then the same code in a device project connecting to a device and then connecting to an emulator. I prepared the machine before the short presentation by running VS normally for the desktop project and then running another instance elevated for the device project. I also wanted to save time by launching the emulator ready to use, so I did that from the VS menu and the first instance of VS that I came across was the desktop project. Can you spot the mistake I made?

When later in the presentation I tried to connect from the device project to the emulator I was treated to this:

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Device Emulator
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Error: The current VMID is in use. Wait for the other application to exit.
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OK
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Cryptic or what? The solution of course was to shut down the emulator and this time launch it from the elevated VS instance.

The moral of the story: You cannot have an elevated VS instance talking to a non-elevated emulator.