Creating a Windows CE Devleopment Environment in a Virtual Machine

As it has come up several times recently.

I have created a guide to setting up a Windows CE Development Environment in a Virtual Machine.

I've written it for Hyper-V because, assuming that you have Windows 8.0, 8.1 or 10 Professional. The entire thing can be created for free* and works to an acceptable level.

* Assuming that you only target H/PC Pro and above

The guide covers:

- Setting up the Virtual Machine in Hyper-V
- Updating the Virtual Machine
- Getting remote access via SMB and VNC (with copy/paste support)
- Targeting Windows CE 2.0, 2.11 and 3.0 via Visual Studio (requires Visual Studio, non-free)
- Targeting Windows CE 2.11 and 3.0 via Embedded Visual Tools (all using free tools)

You can find the guide here:

https://www.hpcfactor.com/support/cesd/d/0009.asp

Looks like you did an amazing job ...detailed and thorough! I appreciate the historical thumbnail sketch as to why WinCE never caught on...so true of the times. I remember seeing the first MS WinCE device and thinking this is going to wipe out all those Palm pilots, just like Netscape in the browser wars.

Edited by joval 2019-06-01 5:22 PM

Assuming you have everything at hand, how much time can setting this up be expected to take?

Once you have everything to hand, a couple of hours assuming you have some experience with virtualisation and NT 4.

Has anyone had success with any 3rd party USB driver for Windows NT 4.0 that would allow connecting to a Jornada 720 via USB? I'm starting to think I should have dug up my Windows 2000 CD instead of going with NT for a development environment. I'm using VirtualBox. If I have a serial cable for the Jornada, I don't know where it is and I don't have a serial port on this computer anyway.

I think that I did once get ActiveSync talking over USB on NT 4, in the very early 2000's. It was a commercial USB stack, I completely forget which one now. It wasn't cheap I remember that much. A machine I had happened to have it on it and I thought I would give it a go. If nothing else it connected.

Instead of continuing to struggle with USB on NT, I setup my development environment using VirtualBox and Windows 2000. I'm using eVT and also have the HPC2000 SDK installed. I can compile a test program fine but when choosing Build, Execute in eVC++ get a CPU Mismatch Warning


I do not get the preceeding warning when clicking Build, Start Debug, Go

Either way, the compiled pogram runs just fine on the Jornada.

In order for eVC++ to be able to communicate with the HPC, I had to select "PPP Transport
for Windows CE" in the Platform Manager. Leaving the default "Microsoft ActiveSync" selected
as the transport method resulted in a timeout after 90 seconds. I'm running ActiveSync
Version 3.5.

I suggest you move to AS 3.8, the last update release there.

I upgraded to AS 3.8 and it still behaves the same. It's not a show-stopper, as I can still compile, debug and transfer files to and from the device. It does seem odd to be getting the warning though. Maybe I'll try fresh install of Windows 2000 and eVT and SDK and ActiveSync.

Oh, suggesting AS3.8 was nothing to do with the error.

I think the error is due to a missing registry key on the HPC2000 device that identifies the target to the debugger.

During initial SDK installation I noticed in the readme that a key should be added and a soft reset performed so I had added the Platform ={0F9D255B-97DA-4641-A8E6-7A7411D2472F} registry key under HKLM\Windows CE Tools.

The addition of the Platform registry key DOES get rid of the dialog box titled "Warning" with text "The targeted platform HPC 2000 does not match the connected platform. Continue?" that otherwise occurs when initiating the build process and when starting debug.

Adding the Platform key does NOT eliminate the popup titled "CPU Mismatch Warning" that occurs when pressing Ctrl-F5 or selecting "Execute" from the "Build" menu. I'm not sure yet if this is a bug in ODARM.DLL or if there is another registry key needing to be added to the HPC.