WP7 Emulator

I’ve been using the WP7 Emulator for a while now and its pretty useful.  It starts up quickly and on my dev machine is pretty responsive.  The Emulator is pretty limited in its functionality though – I wanted to test a send email code fragment but was unable to do so as it is not possible to set up email accounts.

A couple of useful bits of information though:

1. Press PgUp to use the dev machine keyboard for input – it’s much quicker and far more convenient than pecking around on the Emulator keyboard.

2. Download an unlocked copy of the Emulator for a richer UX.  However it takes around 2x to boot as the standard Emulator and still does not allow me to set up an email account; it does however let you test an application within the wider phone UI context.

I have both the official Emulator and the unlocked Emulator in the same directory.  I can then simply rename the one I want to use and its kicked off when I run my application in VS2010.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v7.0\Emulation\Images

There are various blogs that explain how to unlock the Emulator but if all your after is the binary then I downloaded mine from here:

http://www.multiupload.com/TGBSSOXCO7

I was a bit dubious about the site to start with but it works (I don’t have an account and just took the time hit on it downloading slowly).

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