Pocket PC development connectivity issues

I have been returning to my roots and doing some Pocket PC development recently. I haven't really done that much since Visual Studio 2003, and to be honest, apart from SQL CE 3.5 which is a modest improvement on SQL CE back then, I feel like everything is pretty much the same. Emulators are slow, debugging is tedious, and device connectivity is sporadic at best. I was happily developing away when for no apparent reason I got the following error when trying to connect to my device which was happily Active Syncing,

Connection failed. A socket operation was attempted to an unreachable network.

I tried everything, disconnect, re-connect the device, shut down, restart Visual Studio 2008, even rebooting my laptop, I was still getting this error. Google was no help either, it appears to be a fairly generic, but seldom encountered winsock error not specifically related to Pocket PC development. What eventually solved my problem was performing a soft reset on the device.

Stopping applications that run automatically on startup

I thought I'd put this information here mainly for my own purposes, because every time I decide to clean up the various applications that run up automatically when I can never remember the windows system tool to use to view these, so I end up doing a google search and have to wade through all the commercial products that do the same thing to find the name of it.

It is mscofig.exe, and is located in the %SystemRoot%\system32\ folder. On Vista you can just click on Start then type msconfig and hit enter. It is also accessible through the Administrative Tools folder in Control panel.

Once this has opened you can go to the startup tab and deselect any annoying programs that appear in the system tray that you really don't use, and don't provide an option for you to stop this behaviour.

Technorati tags: msconfig, startup, Vista, system tray