Visual Studio 2003 Emulator Issues

[Guest Palindrome]

Today I dusted off Visual Studio 2003 with the idea of starting to explore Pocket PC 2003 programming. When I installed it and tried to run my first app I received an error stating the Virtual drivers would cause Windows XP SP2 to become unstable so they have been halted (or words to that effect).

Has anyone had the same problem? Is there a workaround or an updated set of drivers? I've had a look through Microsoft's knowledgebase but the things they suggested didn't work (altering the boot.ini file so that PAE is altered, reinstalling the software and emulators, installing the Pocket PC 2003 SDK etc.).

[Guest MECX]

Hey, i had this problem and it took me AGES to sort it, so ill pass on the wealth :-)

Windows XP has this thing called 'Data execution prevention' which from my knowledge stops programs who do not have permission from executing in RAM.

For this feature to work an extra bit needs to be used to flag programs that dont have permission to execute in RAM, since you need an extra bit Microsoft enabled a feature called 'Physical address extension' (PAE) which was used originally for allowing windows to access more than 3GB of RAM.

Anyway the windows embedded compiler doesnt exactly like PAE mode or DEP, so you need to disable it, if you right click on my computer and go to properties you will see at the bottom that PAE is enabled.

To disable it you just need to change the /noexecute in the boot ini file to /execute.

You are less secure with this option disabled but not much less Id say, as long as you have good AV and scan regulary you will be fine.

[Guest Palindrome]

That worked a treat. Many thanks. Time now to think of interesting apps to work on.