Cannot establish connection...

[Nick Chadwick]

Hi.

I seem to be the latest victim of the "Cannot establish connection"
problem...I have been developing using VS.NET 2003 without any
problems for some time now. However, last night my PDA battery ran
down, so I charged it up, and the next time I tried to deploy/debug my
application VS could not connect. I have not removed, reinstalled or
done anything else to ActiveSync on my development machine, nor indeed
any other software. I have not changed anything on the device. I have
tried warm-boots, cold-boots, reboots of development machine. I have
tried everything I can find on the internet to rectify the problem
(proxyports.reg, deldesktopcryptkeys.exe, etc. etc.) to no avail. At
one point, I copied toolhelp.dll from the CE utilities to the device,
and it worked. But within minutes it had gone wrong again. Trying the
same again makes no difference.

Please can somebody help me before I start throwing things against the
wall?

Thanks,
Nick Chadwick

 

[Joe Keller]

This worked for me in solving the same issue on my machine:

"Error: Cannot establish a connection. Be sure the device is physically
connected to the development computer."



Geoff,

Thanks for the help and to all that's interested here's the solution I
finally worked out to fix the problem...

Review this article -
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;816826

Download this utility and install -
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...086-b0cc-7c6c39b28762&DisplayLang=en#filelist

1. Import ProxyPorts.reg. to the registry.

Note ProxyPorts.reg is located by default in Program Files\Microsoft
Visual Studio .NET 2003\CompactFrameworkSDK\WinCE Utilities\WinCE
Proxy Ports Reg.

2. On the computer that is running Visual Studio .NET, run the
DelDesktopCryptKey.exe utility from the command prompt to clean the security
key container for the current user. DelDesktopCryptKey.exe is installed with
the Windows CE Utilities for Visual Studio .NET 2003 Add-on Pack. By
default, DelDesktopCryptKey.exe is located in the Program Files\Microsoft
Visual Studio .NET 2003\CompactFrameworkSDK\WinCE
Utilities\DelDesktopCryptKey folder

3. Remove the device from the cradle and replace it. If deployment
still does not work, soft-reboot the device.

Hope this saves someone from the frustration I had!

[Original message clipped]

 

[Guest]

Thanks this utility helped me as well.