So I'm working on a dot-net project right now, and we are supporting mobile devices. I figured I would just download some emulators for iPhone, Android, etc, and check out how things look.
First stop, Apple. Here, the only way to get the iPhone emulator is to download the entire 2.08 Gigabyte SDK after creating a developer account. I'm not very interested in either of those things, so I figured it would be easier to just find someone with an iPhone when we get it on a public server.
The Android SDK is much easier to obtain (only 186 Megabytes, no account required). After reading up on how to start the emulator, I found it will not connect to our internal servers by name or IP. Another failed attempt.
Moving on, I was happy to see Visual Studio has a bunch of Windows CE device emulators bundled. But try to enable "networking" for the emulated platform, and you'll get a message saying that Virtual PC is required, with a download link. That's right, Microsoft device emulators in Visual Studio cannot simulate a network connection without installing Virtual PC 2007. Again, I am not interested.
Why is this so difficult? Why not separate the emulators from SDKs for download? Why not write them to use the host OS networking transparently?
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