Ditch the SmartPhone Emulator in Visual Studio!

October 04, 2005 @ 12:31 am

I’m doing another SmartPhone Session next month in Germany at Rainer’s German FoxPro DevCon and I had to revisit my demo TimeTrakker application with the latest VS.NET release candidate. It looks like some problems that I had with Beta 2 with the Emulator have been addressed. For one the RC got me online without any special configuration using Internet Explorer, which is a big improvement over what was happening in Beta 2 where connections were incredibly flaky.

Unfortunately I still have major problems with connectivity from within my applications. My application is an online offline app that connects to a Web Service on demand and when first starting up to get initial list data. I’m unable to get the damn emulator to connect to the live Web Service on the Web. It does – maddeningly – work against my local machine. This means I can test it at least, but it’s a mystery why it can’t make the live connection, when IE can both connect to the Web and my local machine. I suspect that the problem is some sort of connection configuration, but I can’t tell WHAT actually fails. I get an incredibly useful WebException which has no error information other than that’s a Connect Failure. Thanks…

The other problem is that Emulator is DOG. So much so it’s practically unusable. I was complaining about this in Beta 2 and while performance has improved some it’s still ridiculously slow. Any sort of IO operation while debugging takes a life time while you’re twiddling your thumbs. Example: Starting this small app takes around 30-40 seconds in the Emulator. Granted it does a few things that are expensive in terms of a SmartPhone Application – it tries to access a Web Service or read data from a tiny DataSet (which is the only remotely parsable built-in API that SmartPhone 1.0 has) and retrieves settings and a list of customers. It’s quite pathetic, especially when compared to operation on a real phone which does the same thing in 10 seconds incuding a connection that actually works…

Sure starting a Hello World app is much faster, but any real world app likely needs to load some sort of state and data, and this is apparently what’s so slow. Any IO bound operation drags on and on. Part of the problem appears to be the JIT compilation of code. Some things are pretty expensive there, like trying loading an XML file – even if tiny - into a DataSet. The app churns and churns apparently while .NET is loading and compiling the .NET libraries. After initial load the app actually run pretty quick. For example, a first Web Service Load on the phone takes 15-20 seconds (regardless of whether it’s local machine or Web). A subsequent call to the Web Service takes 2-3 seconds. So startup speed is a huge a issue…

But to give credit where credit is due the Emulator also has a few high points including full support for ActiveSync which means you can test synching scenarios and you can use the ActiveSync manager application to access the Emulator. One very important feature that wasn’t in the VS2003 Emulator was the inability to access files on the device because the non-OEM versions of Mobile Windows that the Emulator runs doesn’t have a File Manager (who was the genius who thought of leaving out a way to manage files out of the base OS???). With the ActiveSync manager you can now browse the device’s file system and drag and drop files onto it. The new DMA transport also is supposed to make network access much more consistent and on first blush – Web Service problems aside – this seems to be the case given that IE immediately fired up and sees both local and online Webs.

Forget the Emulator

After fighting with the Emulator some more today I think this thing is an unworkable solution for development unless you have the patience of a Zen Master. I try – but was ready to launch the laptop into the wall a few times today. Sorry, but I rely on a debug/run cycle and with the Emulator this is just not reasonable with anything beyond a Hello World application.

It’s truly a mystery to me how Microsoft could build a new Emulator that has such horrible performance – especially compared to the emulator that was in VS 2003. Granted there are many feature enhancements, but the new emulator is a PIG. If it’s too slow to efficiently develop and debug an application it doesn’t matter how many new features there are. It’s slow and takes a shitload of memory ( it runs 120 megs and chews 90% of the my CPU even when idle). It’s no wonder this platform isn’t going nowhere when the tools are this crappy.

To move forward I tested on my actual AudioVox SMT5600 phone and this actually works much better. Performance is still not exactly stellar but compared to the emulator it’s much better – I’d say it’s easily 3 times faster.

Here’s another thing I didn’t know: You can get the live phone connect to your local machine when it’s connected via ActiveSync. The phone is seeing my machine by NetBios name so I can call my Web Service locally. Not sure how I missed this before, but I sort of assumed there was no way the live phone could do that. This setup works well for testing locally, but apparently the phone can’t deal with making a true Internet connection while connected through ActiveSync. As soon as I try to connect to my Web Service ActiveSync disconnects and with it of course the viewer application. So, there’s still no way for me to run my live Web Service in debug mode… but I guess I can live with that at least for development.

Pocket-Controller to the rescue

The big issue for me though is that I need to present this stuff. I ran into a very cool third party tool called Pocket-Controller that allows you to view the Phone’s screen and manipulate the UI through your desktop computer. This things been around for a while – I heard about it before but I didn’t quite make the full connection. Being fed up with the Emulator I downloaded and installed it today and used it for a few hours debugging my app. It works very well for this environment.

When connected I can use either my desktop or the phone to navigate and the screen is echoed back into the viewer. Any button clicks you make on this viewer are transferred to the phone or you can control the phone directly and have the view monitored on your PC screen. It’s $30 utility, but if you use your phone a bit for development this will pay back for itself in no time. Another cool thing about this thing is that it’s a great way to enter information into you phone with your keyboard instead of going into T9 key contortions.

This tool has a number of other cool features like the ability to capture screen shots and record video right off the device. There is also external File Manager, that lets you browse on the desktop and then launch files on the device.

This is very cool – I now have a much more reliable environment for working on my apps. BTW, it works with Pocket PC devices as well.

So I’ll still need the emulator for my Mobile Web Control demos, but for that the Emulator actually works properly both against local and remote machines.

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re: Ditch the SmartPhone Emulator in Visual Studio!
by Kevin Wright October 04, 2005 @ 4:38 am

Another alternative is Microsoft's own (free) Remote Display Control, which allows you (via ActiveSync) to display the attached PDA's screen on your own display; even magnify it several times to make it visible when speaking to a class.

Kevin

re: Ditch the SmartPhone Emulator in Visual Studio!
by Barry Bond October 05, 2005 @ 6:45 am

Rick, sorry to hear you're having so many problems with the DeviceEmulator. I'm the emulator architect and am responsible for both the good and bad you're experiencing.

First, I'm glad the ActiveSync-over-DMA solution is working well for you.

On the issue of performance, the DeviceEmulator is significantly slower than the emulator in VS 2003. The VS 2003 emulator emulates an x86 CEPC device, which is relatively easy to do, given that it is running on an x86 PC. The new DeviceEmulator emulates an ARM processor and board, and the overhead of emulating the ARM MMU, page protections, alignment faults, etc. is pretty big. Don't give up hope though! Performance is top on my list for future emulator releases, so keep an eye out for new and improved emulators with greater performance. The VS 2005 release runs about as fast as a 200MHz device, with some operations much faster and some much slower.

I don't see cases where the emulated guest OS is idle and the DeviceEmulator is using 90% CPU. On my machines, when the guest is idle, the DeviceEmulator always drops to 0% or 1% CPU.

Network connectivity... The new DMA Transport that VS 2005 uses to communicate with the emulator doesn't solve network connectivity: instead, it bypasses it by using a private data pipe between a Windows app and the guest OS running inside the emulator. There is no network protocol involved, no IP addresses, no ethernet frames, etc. ActiveSync is your best bet for having PocketPC apps talk out over the network. The one gotcha is that you sometimes have to tell PocketPC apps to use "My ISP" instead of "Work Network" to get them to connect.

re: Ditch the SmartPhone Emulator in Visual Studio!
by Rick Strahl October 05, 2005 @ 5:59 pm

Barry,

Thanks for the feedback. I guess I'm very frustrated having fought the emulator for countless hours.

The worst problem in addition to performance is that the emulator does not want connect to the Internet from within a Web Service. IE connects to the Internet fine, so it looks like this is something in the network config that might have to be done and that might have changed between beta 2. I actually see exactly the opposite behavior that I saw with Beta 2 where I couldn't connect to the local machine with a Web Service...

Any insight what 'proxy' settings are required for a Web Service implementation for a reliable connect? You know the equivalent of unchecking the 'Auto-detect connection' option in the IE configuration without which IE won't work either...

re: Ditch the SmartPhone Emulator in Visual Studio!
by Rick Strahl October 07, 2005 @ 2:29 pm

Kevin,

Took a look at the ActiveSync Remote Control as part of the Windows CE PowerToys kit which can be found here.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=74473fd6-1dcc-47aa-ab28-6a2b006edfe9&displaylang=en

It works, but you can't control the phone from the desktop, which is nice for debugging. Still think Pocket-Controller is a better choice if you're developing. One thing that is not cool about this though is that it always stays loaded consuming memory. Which pretty much means you'll want to load it up when you're working/debugging and uninstall when you're done.

re: Ditch the SmartPhone Emulator in Visual Studio!
by Kevin Wright October 08, 2005 @ 1:31 pm

> Took a look at the ActiveSync Remote Control as part of the Windows CE PowerToys kit which can be found here.

Yup, that's the thing I meant. However, I forgot you were doing phone stuff - whenever I have used it it has been with normal PDAs.

Kevin

re: Ditch the SmartPhone Emulator in Visual Studio!
by Peter Bromberg October 18, 2005 @ 4:29 pm

Hi Rick!
I've gone through this same revolving door of pain (if you will) and I've been able to bring up ActiveSync, then using the DeviceEmulator manager, right-click the device node and tell it to "cradle" and then Active Sync will connect, thinking the emulator is actually a real phone. From that point on everything is fine. It can be a bit quirky, but it seems to work OK.

re: Ditch the SmartPhone Emulator in Visual Studio!
by Rick Strahl October 22, 2005 @ 8:44 pm

Peter,

Yeah I can get that to work as well. Problem is that it's really quirky. My issues are the following:

Can't connect to Web Services online or on the local machine, while the phone IE actually works well.

Same funky issue with the real phone connected via ActiveSync. IE works fine and runs through the ActiveSync Internet Connection, but as soon as I use a Web Service, the connection tries to use hte radio, disconnects ActiveSync.

For normal operation this isn't a big thing, but I need to demo this stuff in front of people and I cannot for the life of me get all the common scenarios to work.

re: Ditch the SmartPhone Emulator in Visual Studio!
by Nino B S May 24, 2006 @ 10:12 pm

I have ever some problem too ... But I use Pocket PC Emulator ..
The emulator can connect from IE in emulator but can't connect through application which use web service in localhost ...
But finally i can solve by using microsoft loopback adapter ...
Here the way step by step :
1. Install Microsoft loopback adapter (Just Give the IP 192.168.0.1 and subnetmask 255.255.255.0) (http://www.pocketpcdn.com/articles/emulator_loopback.html)
2. Install Microsof Active Sync 4 and cradle it (http://blogs.msdn.com/akhune/archive/2005/11/16/493329.aspx)
3. In Emulator : Start->Setting->Connections->Connections
Choose Advanced->Select Network ... Set All to My Work Network
4. Make sure your IIS give acces for anonymous
5. Test with IE in Emulator : 192.168.0.1 if the web show then it means connection succed
6. The link you use in VS .. is 192.168.0.1 for web reference do not use localhost ...
I hope it's help

There are another link which can be used .. i haven't tried but it may be usefull :
http://nino.net/blogs/nino/archive/2006/01/20/WM5EmulatorInternetConnectivityWithoutActiveSync.aspx

re: Ditch the SmartPhone Emulator in Visual Studio!
by John Rodley July 26, 2006 @ 7:57 pm

Couldn't agree with you more Rick. I'm using VS2005 to develop for the motorola Q and wrestling with the smartphone emulator has at least doubled the effort involved. Particular complaints:

1. Too slow - Rick hit that hard. 'Nuff said.
2. I can have network connectivity (via activesync DMA) or I can debug my app via the VS debugger but I can't have both. Correct me if I'm wrong. As it is, I'm debugging a networked application with printf statements.
3. VS won't connect to emulator on startup. This is a 3 out of 4 times occurrence.
4. Emulator won't go away once it's been started and refused to connect. Okay, you start VS, start a deploy, the deploy fails, so you just kill the emulator and try again, right? Wrong, devemulator is an unkillable app. Requires a complete reboot. Combine this with item #3 and I have to reboot 3 times to get into a mode where I can even use the emulator.

re: Ditch the SmartPhone Emulator in Visual Studio!
by John Rodley July 27, 2006 @ 1:53 pm

Okay, I was wrong about network connectivity and debugging, but the emulator is still a real drag.

DotNetSlackers: Ditch the SmartPhone Emulator in Visual Studio!
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