Visual Studio Smart Device Projects build slowly

If you are developing a smart device application using either Visual Studio 2005 or 2008, you may be experiencing extremely slow build times every time you make a code change. This can be very frustrating when all you want to do is continually build, deploy and debug. It is most likely that the slow build is being caused by the platform verification task (PVT), which is a post-build task that runs by default. More information can be found here on what the PVT is and why it is required. You can however disable it temporarily as it is not required to be run every time you build your smart device application.

To disable the PVT, you can perform the following steps.

1. Open the file %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Microsoft.CompactFramework.Common.targets (if using Visual Studio 2005) or %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.5\Microsoft.CompactFramework.Common.targets (if using Visual Studio 2008) for editing.
   
2. Go to the line which reads:
   

   ...
   

3. Change it to:
   

   ...
   

4. Add the SkipPlatformVerification environment variable to the system and set it to "true" (To re-enable Platform Verification set the environment variable to "false").
   
5. Restart Visual Studio for the changes to take effect (If building from the command line using MSBuild, add /p:SkipPlatformVerification=true to your command line to turn off the task. You can specify the variable in the project file also, so that this information is persisted across sessions).
   

Source: Visual Studio For Devices blog

Trying something new

I'll be giving these Level Max900i pads a go to see how they compare to the Type HC+ at an upcoming Exe Crew track day at Winton.

[Video] Exe Crew Motorkhana - DECA Shepparton

Here's a video of me versus my girlfriend on one of the courses.  Thanks to Agnes for recording it.

Exe Crew Motorkhana - DECA Shepparton

Exe Crew ran their first motorkhana event on Saturday (26th March 2011).  The event was held at the DECA training facility in Shepparton (Victoria, Australia) consisted of two main parts - motorkhana on the skid pan and hill climb style time trials on the "long wang" and "mini wang".

Some people take motorkhana very seriously and are adept at maneuvering their car around the cones with what seems like such ease that it's deceptive.  For a noob like me, I take the opportunity to practice controlling my car control rather than focusing on how fast I can complete the courses.  Most importantly, it was great fun.

I should have a video of one of my runs up here soon.  In the mean time, here are some photos by the Noisy Ninja.

Thank you to Anja Andrews for the two photos above.