welcome to the FORMER funcave: wm5 device emulator: connection

so we’ve installed the standalone device emulator and tricked it out.

now let’s see how this baby handles.

since an emulated wm5 device only has a fake gprs connection…

device emulator offers several other options for network connectivity, including ethernet…which will be the primary focus of this episode.

at the outset, we discussed the installation of device emulator inside a virtualpc environment, making that a primary goal of this series.

unfortunately, trying to enable ethernet connectivity for device emulator running inside virtualpc remains only marginally less productive than smashing your head against a brick wall.

so for this particular episode, all discussion will concern device emulator running outside a virtualpc environment.

last episode, we outlined the command line switches available when executing device emulator.

the switches we’ll look at right now are /p and /n, which enable the ethernet interfaces included in device emulator.

for our purposes, /p will be the only switch we will use, since it enables a standard ne2000 compatible ethernet interface, a driver for which is included in windows mobile 5. the interface enabled by the /n option does not include a native driver in windows mobile 5, severely curtailing its usefulness to us mere mortals who can’t write our own driver code.

altho a bare /p switch will work to auto-enable the ethernet at emulator boot…

if the hardware you are using to run device emulator has multiple physical network interfaces, you should add the chosen interface’s mac address to the /p switch to lock it to that particular interface.

otherwise, when device emulator loads, the virtual ne2000 interface may bind to a different physical network interface than the one you originally intended…

which tends to play havoc on your logical network design…

and which usually means your demo, or whatever, ends up sucking wind.

still…

even with a mac address added to the /p switch, you might still find that you have no connectivity, particularly to the internet, even if all other devices in your environment can surf the web just fine.

if that’s the case, yours truly has the hookup you need right here:

click start->settings

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click connections at the bottom, then network cards

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tap ne2000 compatible ethernet driver

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if a dhcp server is active in the environment, then you should see a dynamically assigned ip address listed in the box. you will notice that the ip address received by the device emulator is different from the one used by the host machine.

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you could set a static ip address, if you wish…but be sure to set it to a wholly unique address on the network.

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if you have no clue why this might be important, then study the subject of this post.

also, don’t forget to add name server values on the name servers tab if switching to a manually assigned address.

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again…if the importance of this escapes you, read the aforementioned post again.

if it remains a mystery after that, think about changing careers.

however, if you are either receiving or have set an appropriate ip address, then you should click ok all the way out to the today screen to save any changes, including the adapters notice…

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