Mohit Gogia's weblog : What's new with Device Emulator V3 Beta

 

What's new with Device Emulator V3 Beta

As you are aware Visual Studio "Orcas" Beta1 just released few days back. Here's Soma's blog http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2007/04/19/visual-studio-orcas-and-net-fx-3-5-beta1-shipped.aspx which contains link to dowload Visual Studio "Orcas" Beta1. With Orcas beta1, Device Emulator V3 Beta was packaged.

 During Device Emulator V3, we tried to focus on the automation and manageability aspect. Following are the list of features we introduced in V3. In future blog posts, i'll go through each of them in detail and explore various scenarios in which you can make use of these.

1. Corecon Lite:-  Do you have custom emulator configurations and custom images which you want to see in Device Emulator Manager and get all the benefits of Device Emulator Manager - like Cradling, then this is the feature you would be interested in. In addition you can make use of this capability even if there is no Visual Studio installed - so your custom images are visible in DEM with the added benefits of following features.

2. Automation Interfaces:- Did you ever wished that there are APIs using which you can perform various tasks as is done by Device Emulator Manager? Automation Interfaces is the feature which adds this capability - it exposes the functionality provided by DEM through various APIs, so you can browse through the list of emulators available to you and perfom various tasks like Connect, Cradle, Reset, Shutdown, Reconfigure, Save configuration of an emulator. This API becomes very powerful tool when you use this in association with RAPI (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa458022.aspx), so you can effectively write you own test automation framework.

3. Dynamic Reconfiguration:- File->Configure dialog in emulator provides some capability where you can modify the emulator configuration or guest OS properties but that is totally a manual operation or you write framework using SendKeys (which may not be reliable). With V3, we have added API as well in DEM UI functionality using which you can save the configuration of an emulator, modify it according to your needs and apply it to the emulator. Let us say you wanted to test your application behavior in various battery conditions - and write automation for it - you can save the configuration of the emulator, enable battery and set the charge and then apply this to Device Emulator (all using API...:)), and then monitor your application behavior. In addition, you can save the configuration of the emulator and create an altogether different emulator by modifying this configuration in association Coreconlite feature discussed above - so you can have five different emulator configurations equivalent to 5 different devices in Device Emulator Manager view (as well as through API interface).

 So stay tuned on detailed discussions on these new features.

And as always you feedback is pretty important to us - please keep the comments coming and we'll trying our best to make sure you derive best of capabilities and productivity boost out of Device Emulator. In addition, please report any issues you find through Microsoft Ladybug system http://connect.microsoft.com/site/sitehome.aspx?SiteID=210

 Namaste.

Mohit Gogia

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Published Saturday, May 05, 2007 9:34 AM by mohitgog

Mohit Gogia's weblog : What's new with Device Emulator V3 Beta