I have recently installed Windows 7 and I have come to a conclusion. While Active Sync was old and did not work great, it did work. I could connect to my devices and emulators after the proper rituals and incantations.

The other conclusion I have come to is that *Windows Mobile Device Center* is worse that Active Sync was. I cannot get it to reliably connect to my emulator (yes, I have set the connection type to DMA) despite how many times I cradle and uncradle. (The emulator connects to the Visual Studio Debugger just fine though.)

With active sync I had to [manually press the connect button](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2951922/device-emulator-mananger-and-activesync) in the connection settings after cradling the emulator. The biggest change I can see with *Windows Mobile Device Center* is that they removed that button.

Is there any way to get Active Sync to work on Windows 7 so I don't have to deal with this? Or is there some way to get it to connect to Windows Mobile Device more reliably?