Tag Archives: emulator

Starting the Windows Phone emulator without Visual Studio

I know it’s pretty simple to open Visual Studio and then launch the Windows Phone emulator, but let’s be honest… we’re pretty lazy, and sometimes it’s just convenient to launch it with just one click.

We could create a launcher on our taskbar by creating a shortcut to %ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft XDE\8.0 and putting it in the taskbar. However, we’ll have to tune it a little bit more. We’ve to change the target of the shortcut (we can change it from its properties) and set it to:

"%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft XDE\8.0\XDE.exe" -memsize 1024 -createDiffDisk %localappdata%\Microsoft\XDE\dd.720x1280.1024.vhd -vhd "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v8.0\Emulation\Images\Flash.720x1280.vhd"

Other time it could be useful to launch it from the command line or from a script. We can do it from the PowerShell with:

Invoke-Expression "& '${Env:ProgramFiles(x86)}\Microsoft XDE\8.0\.\XDE.exe' -memsize 1024 -createDiffDisk ${Env:LocalAppData}\Microsoft\XDE\dd.720x1280.1024.vhd -vhd '${Env:ProgramFiles(x86)}\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v8.0\Emulation\Images\Flash.720x1280.vhd'"

If for some reason you’ve lost your marbles and you’re using the ancient CMD, I’ve translated the sentence into your rusty language:

"%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft XDE\8.0\XDE.exe" -memsize 1024 -createDiffDisk %localappdata%\Microsoft\XDE\dd.720x1280.1024.vhd -vhd "%ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v8.0\Emulation\Images\Flash.720x1280.vhd"

All these commands execute the 720×1280 version of the emulator, but you can also start the 480×800 and 768×1280 versions by changing the numbers 😉