VS.NET 2005 wince SDK installed in vs.net 2008

Installing CE 6.0 SDK's on systems with only VS2008 installed

Michel - July 2, 2010 - 23:28

If you are a device manufacturer or are in any other way involved in building Windows CE 6.0 kernels, you undoubtedly also have to generate an SDK for your device so that application developers can create applications targeting your device.

Platform Builder for Windows CE 6.0 plugs into Visual Studio 2005, but the latest and greatest version of Visual Studio that supports "smart device" development is Visual Studio 2008 (unfortunately not Visual Studio 2010, yet?!). Most application developers will use Visual Studio 2008 for smart device development, so that's what your SDK should support in most cases.

You may have noticed that some of your customers are complaining that the SDK installation aborts and rolls back completely. This only happens on systems that do not have Visual Studio 2005 installed:

The reason for these "ToolsMsmCA(Error): IHxFilters filter registration failure" and"ToolsMsmCA(Error): IHxRegisterSession transaction failure" errors is that the documentation of the SDK is trying to merge with the Visual Studio namespace "VS.VSIPCC.v80", which is the Visual Studio 2005 namespace. Visual Studio 2008 uses the namespace "VS.VSIPCC.v90", and the namespace "VS.VSIPCC.v80" is not available on systems with only Visual Studio 2008 installed.

The solution is simple:

Open your SDK.sdkcfg file and look for the lines:

<PropertyBag NAME="Help2">
        <Property NAME="VS Namespace">MS.VSIPCC.v80</Property>

If you want the SDK to install into Visual Studio 2005 then leave these lines as it is, but if you want the SDK to install into Visual Studio 2008 then change the"v80" into"v90":

<PropertyBag NAME="Help2">
        <Property NAME="VS Namespace">MS.VSIPCC.v90</Property>

and regenerate the SDK.

But what if you have an SDK from a 3rd party and you can't regenerate the SDK? Well, to this problem there are two solutions:

1. Do a custom installation of the SDK and de-select the documentation
2. Use Orca (or any other msi editor) to change the namespace

Of course "solution" number 1 is not a real solution. What if you really need the documentation of this SDK?

Solution number 2 is of course much better. Orca is in the Microsoft Windows SDK which should be on your machine if you've installed Visual Studio. Take a look in your "Program Files" folder and see if there's a folder "Microsoft SDKs". If there is, you'll find "Orca.msi" in the "bin" folder (if not, install Visual Studio or download the Microsoft Windows SDKhere.

Once you've installed Orca you can right click the msi and choose "Edit with Orca". When Orca opens you'll have to select the "Property" table on the left and scroll to the property "VS_NAMESPACE" on the right. Now double click on the value of that property and change "MS.VSIPCC.v80" into "MS.VSIPCC.v90" if you want the documentation to install correctly into Visual Studio 2008.

Of course it would be nice to be able to build one SDK that will install without any problems in any version of Visual Studio that supports smart device development. Without an update to the SDK roller by Microsoft or some more hacking and editing of the MSI using Orca this isn't possible at the moment, but the above solutions will at least give you a way to target either VS2005 or VS2008 with your SDK.

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