Windows Mobile Apps & Web Services in Windows 7

Hello everyone!! it's been a long time!
Well, this week, I was studying Mobile Apps develompment for windows mobile 6 with C#.Net and I got some problems while trying to connect the device emulator to a Web Service (developed by me specially to this mobile app) that was running on my machine. No matter how I tried, I always got the error "Unable to connect to remote server" (Figure 1).

After a lot of reasearch in Google and lots of discussing with my teacher and with the fellows of dotNug, and with some friends, I discovered that I had to follow some steps to get the device emulator talking to my computer.

Environment:

 - Windows 7 Professional Media Center Edition
 - Visual Studio 2008 SP1
 - Windows Mobile Device Center 6.1
 - Windows Mobile 6 Professional App
 - .NET 3.5 compact framework
 - Windows Mobile 6 Professional Emulator

First of all: When adding a web reference to a WebService in your Smart Device project, you CANNOT use localhost at the URL; use the [name of your computer] instead, because to the emulator, localhost is the virtual device itself. Ex.: http://machine_name/webservice1 


Step 2: Install Microsoft Virtual PC, so it will install a virtual network interface which is required.


Step 3: Install Windows Mobile Device Center. It will synchronize the virtual device with the computer.


Step 4:   Open Windows Mobile Device Center and allow DMA connections. This can be done by going to Mobile Device Settings ->Connection Settings -> Allow Connections to one of the following -> Select DMA


Step 5: Open Visual Studio opened in your mobile app
                   - In the toolbar select Device Options Icon (located next to dropdown with the emulators to select from)
                   - Under Device Tools -> Devices I select my Windows Mobile 6 Pro Emulator then click on Properties
                   - Click Emulator Options
                   - Select the Network Tab
                   - Check the first box (enabled NE2000 PCMCIA network adapter and bind to:)
                   - Select the name of your network card

Step 6: Run the emulator by running the application

             - Go to Connection Settings in the Emulator
             Start -> Settings -> Connections Tab -> Connections -> Advanced Tab -> Select Networks ->        Choose My Work Network for both drop downs

Step 7: Open the device emulator manager, go to the model of the device you are using, right click and click Craddle. This will connect the emulator to your machine.

I hope this short tutorial can help you guys solving this issue.

sources:

   http://www.xdevsoftware.com/blog/post/Enable-Network-Connection-Windows-Mobile-6-Emulator.aspx

   http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa188173.aspx