Although not a brand new news, last mont Microsoft released the Standalone Device Emulator, which emulates real ARM based Pocket PC system. This is great news, because there is no longer need to have installed Visual Studio to be able to use the emulator :-). You can download the emulator from microsoft page: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C62D54A5-183A-4A1E-A7E2-CC500ED1F19A&displaylang=en . They also released beta version of their next version of the emulator, which will be included in the next version of Visual Studio, as a Community Test Preview. You can download the preview from this page: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=13F5DE85-30CD-4506-9C5B-A2068FA1EE9E&displaylang=en . Finally on the following page you can find all the links above and some other useful information concerning the emulators: http://msdn.microsoft.com/mobility/downloads/Emulator/default.aspx

Now why I'm writing this to my blog? Let me think ... did I secretly started to work for Microsoft? No :-) - you can actually use the emulator to run Java ME CDC version of JVM for Pocket PC and use NetBeans Mobility Pack for CDC start developing Java application for this platform, as I wrote some time ago in this blog entry. Furthermore if you would like to develop rather Java SE applications for PocketPC, you can try out open source VM for Pocket PC called Mysaifu JVM.