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visual-studio-2012windows-phone-8vmwarewindows-phone-8-emulator

Windows Phone 8 Emulator in VMWare Fusion on OSX


I am attempting to launch the windows phone 8 SDK emulator on my Mac so that i can do simple web testing of mobile websites i build.

I have followed several guides and they all say the same thing. Such as: 6. Once the content (list of files and folders) is displayed, find the VMware virtual machine configuration file – the file with the .vmx extension. hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = “FALSE”

And this guide proved to be quite useful to get it setup: http://developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/Windows_Phone_8_SDK_on_a_Virtual_Machine_with_Working_Emulator

I was able to get Hyper-V support enabled and I have even managed to open the Windows Phone 8 Emulator directly from the Hyper-V Manager. But in this state it is missing the chroming, the buttons, and when the mouse goes across the screen it disappears. The solution to this is said to be launching the emulator directly from Visual Studio.

My problem is when ever i try to launch the emulator from Visual Studio it creates a new image and then goes into a boot look where it keeps crashing and restarting over and over again.

When viewing the Hyper-V event logs i see this error:

'WP8SDK720P' has encountered a fatal error. The guest operating system reported that it failed with the following error codes: ErrorCode0: 0xC000021A, ErrorCode1: 0x88EB9150, ErrorCode2: 0x0, ErrorCode3: 0xC0000022, ErrorCode4: 0xD203BC. If the problem persists, contact Product Support for the guest operating system. (Virtual machine ID 50607D9A-6E23-4369-9D89-2730614219BA)

How can i get past this error?


Solution

  • In the end I found a solution, I managed to launch the original Windows Phone VM image directly from the commandline with this command:

    "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft XDE\8.0\XDE.exe" /vhd "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v8.0\Emulation\Images\Flash.vhd" /name WP8SDK720P

    I created a new text file with notepad and put this command in it and saved the file on my desktop as a .bat file. This way i can just double click the shortcut and launch the sim.

    Hopefully this helps someone else out there. In this way, you don't even need to start visual studio to run the emulator, it makes it much simpler if all you are using the emulator for is testing web-apps.

    N.B. if you press FN+DOWN-ARROW you can enable the keyboard to work in the sim.