To begin with, let me wish everybody a Happy New Year. Hopefully many, if not all, of your dreams become true this year. It has been a while since DotNETForDevices has been updated, either with blog entries or with columns. There are in fact a few reasons for that. First off, I have been traveling until last week. At that time, dealing with a huge jetlag, I had to present a webcast on Unit Testing for Devices, I also created two new how-to videos that will at sometime be published on MSDN. Also, I have been busy preparing for a Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2 training that I will deliver this upcoming week. So all in all, things have been very busy after a nice long 2 week break. On top of that I have a brand new computer in my home office, running Windows Vista. That gave me some more challenges, like getting Visual Studio 2008 and the Windows Mobile Device Center to work. I have absolutely no clue why things went wrong, but after installing Visual Studio 2008 for the first time, I ran into problems with the Form Designer, both for Windows applications and for smart device applications. After uninstalling everything and simply re-installing, things now seem to work (something that makes me very, very nervous). I also installed Windows Mobile Device Center on my brand new PC running Windows Vista Ultimate. At first, things looked good. I immediately got a connection to a physical Windows Mobile 6 Standard Device, but when I tried to connect to the Device Emulator, WMDC stopped responding. Also, it was no longer possible to connect to my physical device. Of course, re-installing everything (but this time, immediately after re-installing making sure that DMA connections are allowed), it now seems that WMDC is working properly. Another thing that makes me very nervous, because I am wondering right now how long both VS2008 and WMDC will actually work on this new computer. I definitely am not ready to re-install everything each and every week. It is too bad that there are still so many problems using Windows Vista as an operating system for development and to connect Windows Mobile devices. At the same time, Office 2007 works beautifully with this new operating system, and the UI is really great in my opinion. On a new machine, Windows Vista is also running really fast, so hopefully I don’t have to downgrade to XP once again (as I did earlier with a new laptop computer). So here is my lame excuse for not publishing anything on DotNETForDevices for a while. Well, actually there is more. Unfortunately I can’t say anything about it right now, except for the fact that this has to do with my current professional position. Gosh, I might even need DotNETForDevices pretty soon to ask everybody for help. I know, this sounds mysterious, but I have literally been awake and struggling for over 72 hours right now, not knowing what to do. At one time this will probably become clearer. Right now though, I have decided to pick up things again as usual. So this week I am lucky to teach a Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2 training. Visual Studio is working properly on my brand new computer and right now I can even connect both my physical WM 6 Classic device and all kinds of Device Emulators through WMDC. Also, from now on, my blog and the weekly column will be back. For the rest, I am just uncertain what the future will bring, although hopefully it will bring something good.

Maarten Struys