How To Run Multiple WP7 Emulators
The Windows Phone 7 Tools, including the latest Mango update, provide no supported way for running two emulators at the same time. This can be a problem when trying to see how a multiuser application works across multiple devices. Fortunately there’s a way to workaround this limitation using some unsupported edits to your WP7 emulator settings.
NOTE: This is not a supported change and if something breaks on your machine, well… you’ve been warned :-)
Step 1: Open explorer in Administrator mode and go to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Phone Tools\CoreCon\10.0\addons
Step 2: Copy “ImageConfig.en-US.xsl” and name it “ImageConfig.en-US 2.xsl”
Step 3: Open this new file in your text editor of choice and locate the DEVICE element and change the device name to something of your choice and the device GUID to a new GUID as shown. Use the Online GUID Generator to make generating new GUIDs easy.
Step 4: Given the WP7 is a virtual machine, we also need to supply a new Virtual Machine ID, so locate the VMID section and provide a new GUID in there as well. Again the Online GUID Generator can be used for this purpose.
Ensure that the GUID you insert is in the same format (i.e. with the braces)
Step 5: Save the file and start the Application Deployment Tool. You should now see your new emulator available to deploy your applications to:
If you close and restart Visual Studio 2010 you should also seen the second phone emulator available as a deployment target:
Note that of you run a phone application in debug mode there seems to be no way to launch a second instance on the other emulator whilst the phone is running. It’s not a major problem though since you can simply take the debug .xap file and deploy it to the second emulator using the deployment tool.
I hope this helps you out. Enjoy!
NOTE: This is not a supported change and if something breaks on your machine, well… you’ve been warned :-)
Step 1: Open explorer in Administrator mode and go to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Phone Tools\CoreCon\10.0\addons
Step 2: Copy “ImageConfig.en-US.xsl” and name it “ImageConfig.en-US 2.xsl”
Step 3: Open this new file in your text editor of choice and locate the DEVICE element and change the device name to something of your choice and the device GUID to a new GUID as shown. Use the Online GUID Generator to make generating new GUIDs easy.
Step 4: Given the WP7 is a virtual machine, we also need to supply a new Virtual Machine ID, so locate the VMID section and provide a new GUID in there as well. Again the Online GUID Generator can be used for this purpose.
Ensure that the GUID you insert is in the same format (i.e. with the braces)
Step 5: Save the file and start the Application Deployment Tool. You should now see your new emulator available to deploy your applications to:
If you close and restart Visual Studio 2010 you should also seen the second phone emulator available as a deployment target:
Note that of you run a phone application in debug mode there seems to be no way to launch a second instance on the other emulator whilst the phone is running. It’s not a major problem though since you can simply take the debug .xap file and deploy it to the second emulator using the deployment tool.
I hope this helps you out. Enjoy!