Debugging Windows CE 5.0 application fails on device

Question

I am developing an application that runs on a remote device (I guess it is a ARM processor) The remote device runs Windows CE 5.0 and the application is created using C# and .NET Compact Framework 2.0. I can get the app to run from Visual Studio 2008 using the "start without debugging" menu option (debug or release mode), but the application fails to run when using the "start debugging" menu option (a dialog is diaplayed in VS). The error given in Visual Studio states that: "Unable to start program" "The remote computer does not have a CLR version which is compatible with the remote debugging components"

I have installed the ".NET Compact Framework 2.0 Service Pack 2 Redistributable" but I am wondering if the Redistributable package only contain the release version of the framework, and if that can be causing the error? However; I cant seem to find a ".NET Compact Framework 2.0 SDK"

Any comments will be appriciated!

IDE: Visual Studio 2008 Device: Motorola MT2070 scanner

regards John

Answer 1

You can get this error message if the version of the CF on the device and the one installed on your development machine does not match. The .NET CF runtime is backward compatible, so it's able to run your app in compatibility mode, but if you don't have an exact match between the runtime and your dev environment you won't be able to debug. The first thing you've to do is to check the .NET version you have on the target: http://www.christec.co.nz/blog/archives/113 and then install a matching SDK on your development machine.