Whenever a new version of the Windows Desktop operating system is arriving at the horizon I try to run the Windows program that I have developed over the past years to see if the new Windows version breaks anything.

So with the advent of the Consumer Preview of Windows 8 I was curious if HauteCapture would run and if I would be able to capture screen shots from an attached Windows CE or Windows Mobile device.

Yesterday I installed the Windows 8 Consumer Preview in a VirtualBox VM and deployed HauteCapture. After launching HauteCapture it complains about a missing ActiveSync installation. Since Windows Vista there is no ActiveSync any more, instead the Windows Mobile Device Center needs to be installed in order to establish a connection between a Windows CE device and a Windows PC. Installing and running Windows Mobile Device Center fails when I was trying it for the first time. After rebooting the virtual image and reconnecting a device it was automatically started and requested to install the .NET Framework 3.5.

After that everything finally was in place, HauteCapture recognized the attached device and was able to capture its screen.