Yes, that's true, having an emulator is a very nice thing. You *cannot*
safely limit your testing to the emulator, however. It's too much to expect
that it will perfectly emulate the final device; you *must* test on a real
device and, in the case of WM5, since there are *so* many new things that
the device can do, run in landscape or portrait mode (and switch between
them while your application is running, in fact), have both 320x240 and
640x480 displays, which might or might not exist on the target device, etc.,
you may need several WM5 devices for a proper test.
With the performance items that you mention, you're experiencing something
that I do not see, myself. In fact, most items are *faster* on a real
device for me.
It's not easy and doesn't make any sense to generate an image with
'everything' in it. Have *you* tried that?!
No, you can download the evaluation version and generate an emulator image,
if you want to do that, but you certainly don't *have* to. If you are not
targeting WM5 devices, you should be using an emulator that closely matches
your *real* target device, anyway, not a random one with everything in it.
That would be *completely useless* for testing, as it wouldn't even come
close to matching the real device.
It's ***NOT*** silly. Do you test your desktop application on some sort of
emulator? Of course not! In fact, if you are smart, you test on XP,
Win2000 Pro, Server 2003, etc., to make sure that you are shipping a quality
product that actually *does* work on the systems you say it works with. You
should test and develop on devices that your customer uses, right? Is he
going to run your software in the emulator? I bet he isn't! The emulator
is a convenience, *NEVER* a replacement for real devices.
Paul T.
An emulator can make us save money because it fastens our
developments...
We have developed on emulators for so long time because it reduce our
developments cycles.
We cannot imagine to develop + test on real device each time... because
:
- the time for downloading on real device is longer than the time
needed on emulator
- while debugging, the debug infos come faster to the IDE when we work
on emulator, than the ones from the real device
It would have been so easy for MS to generate a basic Windows CE 5.0
device from Platform builder, with every components within the image...
Why didn't they do that ? It would have been so easy, isn't it ?
So... So... We have to download the evaluation version of Windows CE
5.0
+ Generate an image + test the image and restart the same again until
we have one which is good for an emulator X86
Then we'll be able to test our developments in the emulator...
How would you do if you'd have a team of developers working on the same
real wince 5 device ? Most of them would have to work on emulators...
Thank you anyway for you great advice to use a real device... I'll then
buy one for each of our developpers ??? That's silly !
Paul G. Tobey [eMVP] a écrit :
