Which Mobile Emulator would you use for testing your UWP App?

This is not always clear.

It took a while to figure out this thing. I had Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.5.4 and ran into some design time problems as described in my post.

Following this question taking a suggestion from Stack Overflow, I installed Visual Studio 2017 15.5.6 skipping the suggested 15.5.5. It did help me to avoid the design time problem for a UWP project I was working on. I also updated it to version 15.5.7.

When I tried to view my app on an emulator, I did not find an emulator having used the latest version of Visual Studio in the deployment configuration. . Earlier I did not have this is problem before the upgrade.

Every time , I try to use an emulator to look at my app, I am lead to a Microsoft site for downloading an emulator.

According to UWP Forum on MSDN, there is no hard and fast rule for, 'What emulator with What version of Visual Studio 2017'. It is more to do with the version you are targeting and the build.

You can find this kind of information (you may have agreed for some target version while creating a project, but you can change later, if you need to) in the Project Properties page as shown.

These are the options on my computer.

If you try to change the version (using the drop-down menu, you get this message.

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The project reloads.

Another question that pops up answering the question in the title, is there a emulator running?  This is answered by looking up the Hyper-V Manager and turning on the desired emulator.

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The emulator is on but the deployment fails.

Now I change the target back to the older version.

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The project reloads.

Now I build and deploy to the same, previous emulator, 10.1.14393.0 1080p 6"
Now it deploys to the 6" emulator as shown. The JRelative app is displayed at the top.

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Note: When the emulator is up and running the deployment is faster. It is a productive practice as the OS to start in the emulator takes a tediously long processing time. Another useful tip is keep the Hyper-V manager while developing apps and you need to use an emulator.

I turn off the 6" emulator and turn-on the 5". The next image shows the app deployed to Mobile Emulator 10.1.15254.0 720p 5" 1GB

This comes down to the result that there is no emulator for the OS build version 16299.

Windows 8.1 Phone emulators to use with Visual Studio 2013 Express

As we have seen earlier here, you can develop Universal Apps (Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1). 

You can easily run your App in Visual Studio 2013 Express for Windows with Update 2 RC. However, if you want to run your App in an emulator there are requirements to be met before you can use the emulator.

If you are running the standard Windows 8.1 that is bundled with your laptop you purchased then you need to upgrade it to Windows 8.1 Pro (pay $99.00+tax to Microsoft) because if you use the standard edition and try to run a Windows Phone 8.1 App you will get this warning. Of course to run Hyper-V you need to get the Professional or above edition of the OS.

The emulators run in Hyper-V and that is the reason you get the above message.

Windows 8.1 Professional comes with Hyper-V which you should enable in the Control Panel (Windows Features) as shown.

After enabling Hypr-V you should reboot the computer for the changes to take effect.

Once you do this you can see the emulators in your Visual Studio 2013 IDE as shown. Here I am trying to run a project created using the Windows AppStudio.

 

Microsoft Cloud OS Network is launched

This post is a mini brief note (my version) of Microsoft Post on their TechNet site,
http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_blog/archive/2013/12/12/service-providers-light-up-the-cloud-os.aspx

Microsoft launched the Cloud OS Network to day. Cloud Operating System - CloudOS has a network of more than 25 cloud service providers (CSV's) who will deliver hosted services built on Microsoft Cloud Platform consisting of:

• Windows Servers with Hyper-V
• System Center
• Windows Azure Pack

When business needs are top priority businesses can keep mission critical data applications locally on premises and choose to use the storage and computing in the cloud when needed. This gives them the liberty of having not tied down to just the cloud based service. This network delivers the Cloud OS vision of Microsoft.

Watch this video from the above site (try IE 11, Mozilla or Chrome);