If you are developing .NET Compact Framework apps (Pocket PC or Windows Mobile), using, for instance, Visual Studio 2008, but you are using a Virtual PC 2007 virtual machine (where you have all the development environment installed), things get a little bit tricky when you want to access the network from the “Smart Device Emulator”…

It turns out that when you want to enable the ‘Smart Device Emulator network card’ (from Pocket PC emulator window –> Configure –> Network –> Enable NE2000 network adapter), it needs to have the “Virtual Machine Network Services Driver”. And that driver comes just with the Virtual PC 2007 (there’s no a standalone setup anymore for that..).

So the funny thing is that you need to install “Virtual PC 2007” within your virtual Windows guest machine (for instance I’m using Windows Server installed as a virtual machine). Then, when you enable the ‘Smart Device Emulator network card’ (from Pocket PC emulator window –> Configure –> Network –> Enable NE2000 network adapter), then it will be able to find those drivers. Otherwise, it just says that it cannot find the drivers.

So, in this specific scenario, we need to just install “Virtual PC 2007” into a ‘Windows virtual machine’ which is already running within another “Virtual PC 2007” and hosting Windows (Windows vista, for instance). 🙂

The hole picture could be the following:

Windows Vista –> running “Virtual PC 2007” –> Windows Server (guest OS)–> installed “Virtual PC 2007” (no need to run it) –> Smart Device Emulator –> Enable Network Card. 🙂