Thursday, May 22, 2014

How do you run a Windows Phone 8.1 App?

You can run from Visual Studio 2013 Express for Windows Update 2 if you have the source code. In case you have only the XAP file you can run using the XAPDeploye.exe (61KB)tool which you can find in:

/Program files(x86)/Microsoft SDKs/Windows Phone/v8.0/Tools/XAP Deployment folder.

Well, what is XAP?

XAP is the file format used to install application software on Windows Phone 7.5/8 platforms and Silverlight Applications. This will change in Windows 8.1. You can look at the contents of an XAP file by renaming (by changing .XAP to .ZIP as it is ZIP formatted file) it.

Read about my XAP article here:
http://aspalliance.com/1844_DoubleAnimation_Basics_with_Silverlight_Application

Using XapDeploy.exe tool you can deploy to a connected device or a chosen emulator (choose emulator from drop-down list)


Double click this file (in Windows 8.1 search yo can also lok for Application Development) and the User Interface will be displayed as shown:



Select the device (a Windows 8.1 Phone connected to the laptop) or one of the emulators from the following list:


 Browse and find the file with the extension .xap and click Deploy.


The Emulator gets displayed and the App gets deployed. You have to run XapDeploy.exe in elevated mode(Admin credentials using Run As Administrator). The whole process may take considerable time keep watching the Status of Deployment at the bottom of the Application Deployment Window.

Here is my Honolulu app deployed to the emulator.


 

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Hey, I just wanna ask a question. Where I the xap stored, coz I have dropped my app to my phone through visual studio for debugging but I cannot find the xap in the folders. Please help me out.

Unknown said...

Hey, I have deployed my app using visual studio for debugging but I cannot find the xap package in the folder. Please help me out

mysorian said...

Is it a Windows 8.1 APP or a Windows Phone 8.1 APP.

DMCA.com Protection Status