Deploying the Application to the Windows Phone 7 Emulator

1. Problem

You have developed your application and want to run it, but you don't have the physical device.

2. Solution

From Visual Studio 2010—with your phone project loaded—select Windows Phone 7 Emulator from the target combo box (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. The target combo box set to Windows Phone 7 Emulator

3. Usage

Press Ctrl+F5 or choose Debug => Start Without Debugging. If your code builds correctly, you will see your application running in the Windows Phone 7 Emulator (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Windows Phone 7 Emulator

This emulator is very powerful. It supports multi-touch capabilities if your PC monitor supports touching. It supports graphics acceleration if your graphical device supports DirectX 9 or higher. Obviously, it doesn't support phone sensors such as the accelerator, compass, or A-GPS. When you run the code that uses phone sensors, you will always get the same result. For example, when running the code to retrieve a user's geographical location, you will always receive the same position.

After launching the emulator for the first time, it is convenient to not close it. Every change you make to your code and deploy to the opened emulator will then be visible and testable. With no need to rerun the emulator, the deployment is much faster.

The emulator contains the working version of Internet Explorer plus the Settings application used to change the phone background and styles.

In Figure 2, you can see next to the emulator a little floating rectangle with some icons. These buttons are used to close the emulator, minimize it, rotate it, and zoom it. If you choose a 100% zoom level, you will see a large Windows Phone emulator on your monitor. That's because the Windows operating system assumes that your monitor is 96 dpi, while the Windows Phone display has 262 DPI. To enable you to see all the pixels in your monitor, the emulator shows a very large screen.