Looking to try out Lync Mobile on Windows Phone 7, but don’t have a Windows Phone? That was my scenario when I needed to troubleshoot a sign-in issue specific to WP7. I figured it would be as easy as firing up the WP7 emulator, but there are a few roadblocks here such as the fact that a WP7 emulator exists, but you can’t access the Marketplace in it. There are some workarounds for that, but even if manage you launch the Marketplace you can’t actually sign in with a Live ID to download anything.
So, Phone7Market to the rescue. This freebie application allows you to download an app from the Marketplace and load it into the emulator. The first thing you’ll need is the Windows Phone 7 emulator so start by downloading and installing the Windows Phone 7 SDK from Microsoft.
Now that you have the SDK installed you can launch the emulator, but as you can see there’s not much you can do with it out of the box:
Next you’ll need to download and install the Phone7Market application in order to load Lync Mobile.
After installing, open the Phone7Market program and search for Lync.
Right-click the Lync 2010 result, select Quick actions, and select Deploy to Emulator.
This should launch your WP7 emulator and you’ll see the Lync 2010 application loaded for you:
Tip: Press Page Up once to enable keyboard entry from the host PC. You should be able to sign-in successfully:
The other day I grabbed the latest RTM of Windows Server 2008 to try out in Virtual PC The installation process went smoothly and without incident, but once I got logged into the machine the processor of my host OS was spiking at 100% any time I would click anything in the 2008 VM. I figured installing the VM additions would resolve this, but no luck. I double-checked my power settings on the host OS and everything looked in order so I was stumped.
So when I finally fired up task manager in the 2008 machine I found the culprit: TrustedInstaller.exe was consuming 80-90% of the guest OS CPU. After some investigating, apparently this process manages software updates within Vista/Server 2008 platforms. Since I’m only planning on running this as a test OS I just went ahead an killed the process. I don’t need no stinking updates! We’ll see if this adversely affects anything else, but at least I can now run the VM at a reasonable speed.
Recently I ran into a situation where we had purchased an Exchange certificate from a fairly common certificate authority (GeoTrust) and everything worked well with browsers automatically trusting the certificate… and then we picked up a Windows Mobile 6.0 device from Verizon. For whatever reason, Verizon or Microsoft has decided this particular CA was not trustworthy and isn’t in the default list, so ActiveSync fails to connect to the Exchange server. Fortunately, we can force the device to trust the certificate.
Windows Mobile 6.0 brought a change in how to install certificates. Users cannot install a certificate into the root certificates store on a phone unless the certificate is self-signed. This ensures that only true root certificates exist in the root store.
The pain here is that when you try installing a certificate such as the one used to secure Outlook Web Access it gets dumped in the personal store, and ActiveSync won’t connect because it can’t verify the certificate authority associated with the certificate. The solution is to get the certificate authority’s self-signed certificate into the root store. We can do this with the following steps:
Open Internet Explorer and navigate to the site securing OWA. Click the lock next to the address bar.
Click the View Certificates link.
Click the Certification Path tab at the top.
Click the top certificate name first (the root CA) and then click View Certificate.
Click the Details tab.
Click the Copy to File… button.
Click Next to start the Certificate Export Wizard.
Click Next to export the certificate as a DER encoded binary X.509 (.CER)
Browse to a location where you’d like to save the certificate and give it a name.
Click Finish to complete the Certificate Export Wizard.
You should see a dialog that the export was successful.
Now copy that .cer file you created to the device in some way. Via a storage card, USB cable, Bluetooth, whatever. Just get the .cer in the file structure of the phone somehow.
Power up the phone and click Start.
Find and open File Explorer.
Locate the .cer file you copied to the phone. I called mine root.cer.
Press Menu and then Install.
You should see a dialog that the install was successful. I’ve seen it fail on the first attempt before, so try a few times if you get an error. Press OK.
Navigate to the phone’s Settings option.
Click on Security and press OK.
Click on Certificates and press OK.
Click on Root and press OK.
Scroll to the end of the certificates list or keep pressing More. You should see the certificate you installed listed at the very end of the list. If it’s not there, try starting over and making sure you’re exporting the certificate authority’s certificate, and not yours.
You can now test ActiveSync and it should be able to connect to the Exchange server without ever needing to install your OWA certificate. It’s automatically trusted because the certificate authority now exists in your root certificates store.
