Mobile apps make great consumers for a webservice. But debugging such a scenario can be hard to set up. I lost some hair in getting it to work right; but in the end it was simple. There are loads and loads of good manuals how to setup your device, this one on Akhune's blog tells all, up to connecting to the internet from the emulator. All except how to connect to the web server of the PC your emulator is running on. Which didn't work for me and that's what I really needed to debug my app.

In a typical scenario you have one solution with a webservice and the "smart device app"; where the latter has a web reference to the service. The first problem is the URI the smart app needs to contact the service. The emulator has an emulated network card and so becomes part of your network. It will not be able to find localhost, what works well is using the IP address of the PC hosting the emulator. The emulator and the PC are two nodes in the network. To the PC the emulator is an external source trying to access your local web server. By default the Windows firewall prohibits this. I had bumped into this before, this time I had to add the web server (HTTP) protocol to the settings of the Local Area Connection.

Now the emulator runs as intended. Another great setting of the emulator is zoom under the display options.

It will result in a giant PDA, very readable, very easy to navigate.