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Saturday, February 27, 2016

Windows Phone Emulator hanging at Windows Phone OS is Starting ... using Visual Studio , Windows 8.1, and Hyper-V

I recently setup a Windows Phone 8.1 Project in Visual Studio. I started the debugger and the Windows phone emulator came up. After it said loading it then changed to Windows Phone OS is Starting... It then seemed to sit there for a while.


Before you do anything, please note that if this is the first time running the Windows Phone Emulator, and it has never fully loaded, it can take some time, You might have to wait for it to finish loading , which took me 5 Minutes and 35 Seconds the first load. The next time you debug it, it will only take about 16 seconds. As you can see the first time it runs it takes a long long time, this must be due to creating and configuring Hyper-V and the Image for the Windows Phone Emulater. Please note I do have a very fast newer machine, even then it still took over 5 minutes. So I would run it for at least 10 -15 minutes, if your emulater still does not get past the OS loading, then I would try the following steps:

Here is how I finally got the Windows Phone emulator running in Windows 8.1 using Visual Studio 2013:

I ran XdeCleanup.exe as Administrator. This was located at C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft XDE\8.1 and C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft XDE\8.0 on my machine. I did run both.

I then went into the Hyper-V Manager and deleted the virtual machine for the Windows Phone, if it is still showing:

I then opened up Visual Studio and noticed that I still had the same issue. I then went into Program and Features and clicked on Windows Phone 8.1 Emulators, then clicked Change. Once I clicked change, I  got the following error: Windows Phone 8.1 Emulators - ENU has stopped working.



Now I decided to try and reinstall the Windows Phone 8.1 Emulators, which I found at the location https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=44574 , yet when I downloaded the installer and then cliecked INSTALL, nothing happened. I rebooted and the same issue.

I then decided to try and install the update, which I had not had installed, but came across it on the site, the Windows Phone 8.1 Update and Emulators installer is located here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=43719

Now that I had this installed I rebooted again and ran my project in Visual Studio 2013, running Visual Studio as Administrator. It got to Windows Phone OS is Starting and I walked away from the PC for a few minutes. When I came back I noticed that it had loaded, it took over 5 minutes to load for the first time:



To sum it up, even though I went through all these steps, it turns out, if you have never run the Windows Phone Emulator before and you create a Windows Phone project in Visual Studio and run the debugger, it will create the Virtual Machine and whatever goes along with it. So the first load can take a long time, over 5 minutes. Please let me know how it works out for you.



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