Windows CE .NET...

Amidst my Ph.D. Qualifiers, I've been tempted to play with Windows CE .NET 4.1 (not the latest version). This is what we have available to us on MSDNAA at my school. So I grabbed a copy and figured that I'd setup a CEPC. It's actually pretty sweet. The only problem tha tI have with it is that everytime I power the machien off, it's like doing a hard reset on my PocketPC -- so the next time I boot the CEPC it's back to the original state that I built the image. I'm curious to know if there's anyway to prevent this from happening, ie: save state to the image? (Maybe that's a bit too absurd of a question to ask...)

In any case, getting the CEPC to work took a little while to do. My suggest to others out there who may want to do this, make sure you read the tutorial in Platform Builder on making a CEPC. The biggest problem is support for network cards and video cards (if you want to use the FLAT video driver). After changing from an Intel NIC (which is not supported) to an RealTek RTL8139 series card, everything worked perfectly. I noticed that Microsoft has also made available utilities for VS.net 2003 so that you can publish your app to Windows CE 4.1 or later devices (or CEPCs) without having ActiveSync (actually, not haivng VS.net 2003 yet b/c of delays in shipment of the upgrade CDs, I haven't tested this yet, but this makes me wonder about security a bit... I'll write more about these utilities once I try them out).