One of the extreme joys that I get to endure as part of being both a Pocket PC and a .NET developer is having to maintain 2 different development IDE’s: Visual Studio.NET and Embedded Visual Tools 3.0. Let me start out by stating that VS.NET has totally spoiled me - I love the interface, and I find it difficult to go back to using the old EVC environment since I miss too many of the VS.NET goodies such as code commenting, collapsible code trees, etc. It’s amazing to me how fast you get used to them being there.

I also think I need to state that MS’s strategy in giving away the development tools for Pocket PC is a MUST if they want it to compete at all with Palm, Handspring, and the latest trendy Linux-PDA. However….

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Must it crash 100 times a day? I’ve found that depending on your machine configuration, the environment can either be as stable as a rock, or as shaky as Worldcom’s accounting practices.

The new emulator, while great in theory, is just plain busted. While the new design which moved from a simulated thunking system to using a real nk.bin image helps get a more accurate “experience” of the device, I was pretty peeved when incoming network traffic was no longer supported in it. In one swoop, using the emulator for testing and debugging my application (which was based on incoming HTTP requests) was now totally useless.

This pales in comparison though to the sheer number of times I’ve seen it reset Windows XP. No blue screen. No anything. Just a hard reset when coping a file over to the emulation tool. And yes, as some have suggested, i’ve already tried downgrading driver versions on my NVidia GeForce 2 to earlier versions (although people with ATI cards are also having problems — And, come on, this is one of the most popular video cards out there, not some no-name brand). One time (in band camp) I actually LOST all the source to a project when the emulator crashed. Not good.

The newest problem I’ve been experiencing: The IDE locks up on me consistently if I step into a system call. I accidentally hit F11 on a “TreeView_GetParent” operation - bye, bye IDE. I found the same thing to be true when I hit F11 on a delete operator.

There’s just too many things to list here. And, it’s not just me: here, here, here and here.
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