When you’re developing for Windows Mobile, you need to think about the various flavors and screen sizes that the platform is available on. If you’re not able to stock each of the possible configurations for testing, then you might want to consider using an emulator. By installing the standalone device emulator, you can easily test your application across various flavors of Windows Mobile without the large investment in purchasing devices.
For many, the issue with emulators is how to get your data or application on to it. So I thought I would run through installing emulators as well as how to copy your applications to the emulator. Before we begin, you’ll need to download the following things:
- Microsoft Device Emulator 3.0 – Standalone Release (Download here)
- Windows Mobile Emulator Images – Pick any 1 or all of the following:
- 6.5 Standard and Professional (Download here)
- 6.1 Standard and Professional (Download here)
- 6.0 Standard / Professional (Download here)
- 5.0 Smartphone (Download here) / Pocket PC (Download here)
Once you have the emulator and all the images downloaded we can begin the installation. The first thing you need to do, is install the device emulator. Once that’s installed, you can move along to installing the emulator images that you want to use. I have found that installing 6.5 over 6.1 tends to break the emulator image. This can be fixed by running repair on the 6.1 image. If you’re only installing 6.5 images then you don’t have to worry about that.
Once you have things installed, you will notice your have a couple new items in your Start Menu. In my case, you can see the Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional and Standard images listed. Each emulator image has the screen size and type of OS in the name. So you can be sure about what image you need to run before you actually launch it.
Upon running one of emulators, you will see an image of a device appear on your desktop. The screen will be blank, but if you wait a minute or so, it should automatically start booting up the device. I’ve found that initial boot on the emulators can take a good 4 or 5 minutes. Once you’ve started the image, you can always choose to save the state when you close it so that it doesn’t have to restart every time you want to use it.
Tip: If you’re running a tablet, feel free to grab your stylus and get busy with the emulator image. It works just like using a regular stylus on the device would. 
Now that we have the emulators up and running, let’s get WMDC / ActiveSync setup so that we can easily get files to and from these emulators. To do this, launch Windows Mobile Device Center or ActiveSync (depending on your version of Windows). Edit the Connection Settings page and place a checkmark beside “Allow connections to one of the following:” and then select DMA from the drop down list.
Now we just need to tell the emulator to connect and we’re golden. For whatever reason, after installing the standalone device emulator, there is nothing added to the start menu. Which isn’t really a big deal as you can run the emulators just fine. However, in doing this, they missed providing an easy way for people to access the Device Emulator Manager. To run this, browse to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Device Emulator\1.0 and look for the file called dvcemumanager – this is the Device Emulator Manager. Launch it, and while you’re at it, copy a shortcut to the desktop or someplace handy. When the window opens you should see a list of all running emulators. If you don’t have one running, head back up a couple paragraphs and get one started.
Remember that you can only have 1 ActiveSync’ed device at a time. That continues to be true with the emulators. While you can run multiple emulators at the same time, only 1 can be connected over ActiveSync or WMDC at a time. To get this connected, right click on the emulator and select Cradle. That’s all there is to it. WMDC / ActiveSync will start the connection process and the emulator will appear in your file manager like any real device would. You can copy files to it, install applications, and tweak away without worry or causing harm to your everyday device.
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