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.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Doesn't work for me. If I try to start the emulator it just says "Windows Phone Emulator is doing a complete OS boot..." and then consumes my CPU. 50-80% CPU usage. Have left it running for 15-20 minutes and nothing.

What Mac are you running on? I have a 2009 MBP 17" with 2.8Ghz Core2Duo and 8GB RAM. I've just allocated 1 CPU and 3GB of RAM to Parallels 6.

Randy James said...

I'd love to know if this can work as well. Mine just sticks booting forever... though I suppose I didn't let it try "forever". An hour was long enough.

Daniel said...

I'm running a 2010 MBP 17", 2.66 GHz Core i7, 8GB RAM. The virtual machine has 2 processors and 4GB of RAM allocated.

Parag Chandra said...

I've had luck after the latest update to PD6 (Build 11828). I launched the emulator from the Start menu, waited a few minutes for the full OS boot to occur, and now I can use mobile Internet Explorer to browse the web at least. Haven't tried anything beyond that, and the graphics performance is pretty bad. But at least it's running, which is more than I could say for prior versions of Parallels Desktop. VMware Fusion 3.1 also runs the emulator with similarly bad performance.

Anonymous said...

@first anonymous: I had the same problem and I managed to get it working, by launching from the Start menu. After a few minutes it booted up. So I launch it first. Silverlight apps work OK, but XNA Studio projects don't. It's complaining that my display driver's not capable of XNA.

A little sluggish, too -- same Mac as you, but I gave Parallels both cores.