Requesting information about Windows CE platform for Visual Studio 2008

I cannot find any documentation about what operating systems are supported by the "Windows CE" platform under Visual Studio 2008.

My objective is to develop a C# .NET application for a Windows CE 5.0 (not Windows Mobile 5) device. I inherited a project that had a database back-end developed in Visual Studio 2008 and want to use the same IDE. I had Visual Studio 2005 installed with the Standard Windows CE 5.0 SDK and was able to target a device correctly. After I installed (a side-by-side installation of) Visual Studio 2008, the Windows CE 5.0 target is missing from both VS2008 and VS2005; instead, there is now a platform labeled simply Windows CE.

I've already spent three days trying to figure out how to target a WinCE5 device from VS2008. I even found some references to insta开发者_JAVA百科lling the Standard Windows CE 5.0 SDK using Administrator Privileges for Windows 7, but a co-worker encountered an identical problem for Windows XP.

I would appreciate anybody who could educate me about what Microsoft changed and how to build an application for the correct device type. I've been programming WinCE devices for over a decade and never before run into this level of obfuscation.

Can anyone tell me or direct me to that information?

An important bit of info is that for managed application development you do not need any SDK. Studio has support for a "Windows CE" target, and that is all you need (in fact you can use the "Pocket PC 2003" or any WinMo target and it will still work - the Form designer experience is just not so good.

This is becasue in all cases, the output is MSIL, not a processor-dependent binary.

My recommendation is to not try using ActiveSync for debugging, just use a direct CoreCon connection and you're all set.