Whidbey SmartPhone Dev - Unable to start Debugging

February 13, 2005 @ 1:58 pm

A few weeks ago I got myself a shiny new SmartPhone - the AudioVox SMT-5600. I really like the phone and the integration it provides with office. I admit though that beyond auto-synching my address book and calendar and playing MP3 ringtones I'm not taking especially much advantage of the phone <g>...

Part of the reason I got it though is to start playing with writing some code for this platform. I have an application (a custom time tracker I use) that could benefit from allowing logging in through a Web Service for example.

I've been working on this small app off and on in Whidbey for the last week or so trying to get a handle on some of the new features in Windows forms (nice - I'll have more on this in a few days).

Being the kind of 'jump around' guy that I am I wanted to try the new integrated SmartPhone projects. I set up my form application, set up the Web Service on my local server to post the data and went ahead built a very simple front end that is to communicate with the Web Service.

I was able to run the application on the emulator and, well, it crashed when trying to access the Web Service. Ok, so try again in Debug mode. Unfortunately I was not able to get the app to run in debug mode. The emulator starts and VS.NET thinks about it for a while but I get the incredibly informative message:

Unable to start Debugging.

Alrighty then. Not much to go on. <g>

Googling around a bit didn't yield a whole lot of information, but a couple of posts seem to point to making sure that the phone emulator has a valid IP address - presumably so VS.NET can use Remote Debugging to debug the code on the device.

I'm not really sure how to check for the IP address of the device as suggested. I did set up the device to use the NetCard for its net interface:

Go to Settings, then Data Connections (Shortcut: L, 8, 9, 2).
Change Work Connection to NetCard (Is that short for Network Card? Who knows? *shrug*).
Click Done.
Go into Internet Explorer (Shortcut: L, 4).
Click Menu, then Options (Shortcut: R, 7).
Uncheck Automatically detect settings.
Change Select Network to Work.
Click Done.

and afterwards made sure that the phone can get on the Internet. I'm not sure if that's the same thing as the 'device having an IP address' though - checking my DHCP table I see no entry for a secondary connection.

It looks like deployment works fine - if I just run the app without debugging it actually comes up in the emulator and I can run it until I bomb on my own code <g>. This is why I need to debug and get additional information.

Anybody have any clues?

I'm using the November CTP of Whidbey.

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re: Whidbey SmartPhone Dev - Unable to start Debugging
by Tristan Leask March 11, 2005 @ 10:21 am

Hmm, at least you managed to get the emulator to install. On my copy it won't have it. This is with VS.Net 2003 btw. Because of this i can't even install the smartphone sdk. Ive tried everything that i can find on the issue but to no avail!

re: Whidbey SmartPhone Dev - Unable to start Debugging
by Rick Strahl March 11, 2005 @ 11:12 am

The Whidbey SmartPhone SDK - according to a Microsoft dev - is broken and won't work. I couldn't get the 2003 version of the SDK to work either on my main machine that has Whidbey installed.

I ended up installing the 2003 SDK on another machine that never had any Whidbey bits on it and that works.

I think that this sort of thing is quite pathetic. For all this talk Microsoft has about version independence and using VPC's to isolate the emulators it seems ridiculous that a machine configuration of one product should hammer the install of another especially for something like an SDK.

re: Whidbey SmartPhone Dev - Unable to start Debugging
by Tristan Leask March 11, 2005 @ 12:39 pm

Yeah. I had a trial copy of Virtual PC installed on my machine and from what i have read up on the net it looks like that could have been the problem. I have reinstalled the trial to see if that made a difference but it didn't. This is really annoying me as i can't install the smartphone sdk as it rolls back the changes if the emulator doesnt install.

I think the only way is to somehow get the sdk to install without the emulator. Maybe there is a secret parameter when install package.

I am gonna fire off some emails to microsoft and bitch about the problem, but i am sure it was the vpc that screwed it over for us.

re: Whidbey SmartPhone Dev - Unable to start Debugging
by Rick Strahl March 11, 2005 @ 3:57 pm

Actually I'm pretty sure it's not a VPC thing because I have two versions of Whidbey installed. November CTP on my regular notebook OS, and December CTP which I installed in VPC from a brand spanking new install. I was told by a MS guy that hte CTP SmartPhone SDKs are hosed. The regular SDK works but the Whidbey installs apparently interfere with the regular SDK so that breaks too.

I'm rebuilding my machine over the weekend anyway, but I'm not going to install any more betas onto the live OS. Everything from now on will go into VPC. IF the damn thing just ran faster though - it's dog slow on my laptop - Ok on the desktop. I did get a faster and bigger drive last week (2 actually external and a new faster internal). We'll see if that improves things.

re: Whidbey SmartPhone Dev - Unable to start Debugging
by Tristan Leask March 11, 2005 @ 10:09 pm

Okay. Well good luck with the re build and let me know how you get on.