Error: Cannot establish a connection.

[Guest]

To anyone having trouble trying to deploy their app to the pocket pc device.
We kept getting the "Error: Cannot establish a connection. Be sure the
device is physically connected to the development computer." We worked with
someone from Microsoft and I thought I'd post the steps so someone else might
benefit.

STEP 1

Run Repair on Visual Studio .Net. Put your disk for Visual Studio .Net
Enterprise in the drive. Go to Add/Remove Programs, select Microsoft Visual
Studio .Net Enterprise, Pick Option 2 Visual Studio.Net Repair. It will run
the repair processes and should take about 2 hours.

STEP 2

Download the PocketPC 2003 SDK from Microsoft's website: Microsoft Pocket PC
2003 SDK.msi. It should be around 84MB. It takes about 5 minutes to install.

STEP 3

Copy the DelCryptoKey for your type of device to your PDA. It should be in
this directory:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\CompactFrameworkSDK\WinCE
Utilities\DelCryptoKey

After copying it to your PDA, run it.

STEP 4

On your laptop or desktop, run the DelDesktopCryptKey.

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\CompactFrameworkSDK\WinCE
Utilities\DelDesktopCryptKey

Now launch Visual Studio and see if this resolves your connection issue. It
worked for 3 of our desktops that were having trouble after we had upgraded
our systems to Windows XP. We had done PocketPC development on these same
machines with Windows 2000 but when we upgraded we started getting the error.
Hope this helps!