I'm playing around with windows phone 7 development, when I press F5 Visual studio takes forever to deploy the app, I get
Window Phone Emulator is doing complete OS boot.
What would be the problem?
PS: I'm using windows 7 on Mac with Parallels Desktop
The emulator isn't supported running inside or side by side other VM's at this stage. It is implemented as a VM itself. VM's running on windows platforms will be detected by the emulator startup and a specific error message provided. I've noticed several people having the same issue from Parallels on Mac ... presumably the VM detection doesn't work over there to stop the attempt.
System requirements documented here and here for your reference.
Similar to how we have to run a Mac to develop for iPhone without hassles, you'll need to run a PC to develop for Windows Phone 7 - at least for now.
You may also find your issue with the WIndows Phone Emulator is because the Emulator actually the real phone ROM running in a Virtual Machine. Since your situation is a VM (Windows 7 on Parellels on Mac) this may explain your performance issue. Developers using VMWare have had similar issues plus Virtual PC / Hyper-V does not support Windows Phone 7 at all. Running virtual machines on virtual machines is a massive performance hit, your only solution may be a cheap PC installation of Windows Phone 7 tools etc on compatible hardware ie Graphics Card / with WDDM 1.1 compatible drivers etc.
For my WP8 deployment, I notice that disconnecting my MacBook Air from the power source will slow the deployment down considerably (so will the debugging and tracing).
Simply plug the laptop back to the power source and everything will become fast again.
Don't kill the emulator between debug sessions. There is no need.
Also - Visual Studio 2010 Express For Windows Phone, which is installed with the tools, is much more responsive as it has less features running.
So if speed is really an issue, that may be an option.
