Mobile Device Emulator Error on Windows 7: No VPC network adapters enumerated

After upgrading from Windows Vista (pronounced fiasco) to Windows 7 (OMG, there is life after XP!) and reloading everything because there was no migration path (probably for the best anyway), the Windows Mobile device emulator I was using could not be configured with a network connection.

Several articles were well-written and helped me to understand that it could have been something other than missing the Virtual Machine Network Services driver that was the source of the error (which was not my problem). Brian Peek's Windows Virtual PC and the Microsoft Device Emulator article was a excellent piece that led me to try other debugging perspectives. Ben Armstrong's (Virtual PC Guy's Blog) Fixing broken virtual networking was concise and gave me other clues about dealing with the virtual network driver. Many thanks to them for sharing their experiences.

I tried both solutions and neither fixed the problem. What finally worked was getting to the emulator's connection settings through Visual Studio, since the options I needed were disabled within the emulator itself. Go to Tools > Options > Device Tools > Devices, pick a preferred emulator, click the Properties... button, then the Emulator Options button there. On the Network tab, I added a check to the Enable NE2000 PCMCIA network adapter and bind to: checkbox. The critical step was selecting the actual connected network card - not the Connected Network Card option - in the network adapters dropdown box.

Next time I started the emulator, it saw the network adapter and was able to use it. Without selecting the actual network card, the emulator must try to use a hidden, disconnected network adapter (I have both Ethernet and WiFi network adapters in my notebook, both with virtual network services enabled) and fails to see the connected one, hence the notorious error:

No VPC network adapters enumerated or no host network adapter with provided MAC address found

I tried some other solutions, such as replacing the virtual machine network services driver with the one from Virtual PC 2007. It didn't work either, so I uninstalled and reinstalled the VMNS driver that came with Windows 7's Virtual PC. I also cleared the emulator's saved state several times during my ordeal.

Obviously this workaround to the bug in the VM's network device driver has the drawback that you have to reconfigure your network connection if you change network adapters. But at least it got me working again.

For reference, the development platform I got this working on is Windows 7 32-bit Tablet PC with 2 GB RAM, 100GB hard drive, 1.7 GHz CPU and Windows XP Mode with Vista/7 Service Pack. I use Visual Studio 2005 SP2 with the Window Mobile 5 Pocket PC emulator from the Microsoft Windows Mobile 5 SDK. I do a lot of industrial handheld computer development.