Emulator won't show in Visual Studio 2010

Question

I have been experiencing this issue for a week and tried a lot of workarounds in the internet with no results.

Here is my case: I am trying to install Windows Phone SDK 7.1 on a Windows 8 x64 host. The steps I have followed are:

1. Installed Windows Games for Marketplace Client
2. Installed Visual Studio 2010 and update it to Visual Studio 2010 SP1
3. Installed Windows Phone SDK 7.1
4. Updated SDK to Windows Phone SDK 7.1.1
5. I have tried opening by using Run as administrator

None of the steps listed above returned an error. But I can't seem to run the emulator at all. The emulator list shows nothing in visual studio 2010, and when I attempt to run the emulator as a standalone application, the emulator won't run at all.

Anyone experiencing the same issue or have a workaround for this?

Thanks in advance.

PS: I got the steps above right after googling around and reinstalled the SDK and Visual Studio at least 3 times. If this is to be the issue (eg: a cleanup failed after installation), kindly advise how I proceed.

Update: I have tried installing Windows Phone SDK 8.0 with Visual Studio 2012 and the emulator still not listed in the device list.

Answer 1

I experienced this same issue with Visual Studio 2012 for Windows Phone. The solution was to delete the Visual Studio 11.0 user data directory, located at:

C:\Users\[user]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Phone Tools\CoreCon\11.0

Afterwards, all virtual machines were recreated properly.

---

For what it's worth, I had this issue on Windows 8 under Parallels on a Mac. My Visual Studio / Hyper-V environment may have been corrupted when I put the host machine to sleep (without shutting anything down).

Answer 2

why are you using the Visual studio 2010 when visual studio 2011 is already present there with windows phone 8 sdk with all the windows phone 7 feature included . May be some emulator for windows phone 7 sdk is not supported on win 8 machine. Try reinstalling the sdk , it will resolve the issues.

Answer 3

I still dont know what the cause of this error, but I do have a quick fix for anyone else who might be experiencing the same issue.

The fix for me was to use a new windows profile. (No need to reinstall the application) Just create a new windows profile and use that one.