Wednesday, September 22, 2010

WP7 Emulator on Parallels 6 for Mac

I just upgraded to Parallels 6 and thought I would attempt to run the Windows Phone 7 emulator. Simply building and running did not work. However, I ran the emulator from the Start menu. It took a long time for it to start up. The emulator rebooted a few times, then it arrived at the phone home screen. From there, I could launch the debugger from Visual Studio.

While re-testing for this post, I would occasionally see the following error when attempting to attach the debugger:

a specified communication resource (port) is already in use by another application.

I did a Build -> Clean and retried. Success!

The app that I built does nothing. It was simply the Visual Studio template. So I can’t yet attest to performance while debugging, or the availability of features.

The virtual machine is Windows 7 Ultimate. With the first few tests, it had 1 processor and 1GB of ram, which was an error in configuration. I changed it to 2 processors and 4GB of ram. That didn't seem to increase the speed of the emulator startup by very much.

Please give it a try! I am curious if others can reproduce the success.