How can I run multiple instances of the windows phone 7 emulator at the same time?

Question

I'm creating a multiplayer game for windows phone 7. How can I run multiple instances of the emulator in order to debug it?

Answer 1

You can indeed run multiple instances of the Windows Phone 7 emulator at the same time, and even debug them simultaneously, as I show in my blog post.

1. Open the folder [Your Drive Letter]:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Phone Tools\CoreCon\10.0\addons
2. Locate the file ImageConfig.en-US.xsl
3. Take a copy of it, leaving it in the same directory, and name it something like ImageConfig.en-US 2nd Instance.xsl
4. Open the copy in a text editor.
5. Locate the element DEVICE and change it's Name attribute, also assign a new GUID value to ID.
6. Scroll down the file to locate the part that says PROPERTY ID=”VMID”:
7. Put a new Guid inside that element – make sure though that you use capital letters rather than lower case.
8. Save the file
9. Re open the XAP deployment tool, or Visual Studio, if you already have them open, and you’ll see your new Emulator instances.

See the blog post for more details, and screenshots to clarify some of the steps

Answer 2

You can only run one instance of the Windows Phone 7 emulator at a time on a single machine - that's set by default, and if you don't want to mess with custom configurations. When you deploy from Visual Studio, the same instance is shared between the running instances of the development environment.

However, you can create additional instances of the WP emulator if you follow the instructions in this article. Make sure you backup the config files before editing them.

Answer 3

I had the same problem, trying to test my multiplayer game, and i eventually bought a WP7 device (HTC HD7) on ebay, unlocked it for development purposes, and used it and the emulator for testing.

Since I have experience with the android environment, I can say that denying the possibility of multiple emulator instances really damage the development efforts. Hope Microsoft will change this.

BTW, i'm using the Skiller SDK for the multiplayer and social side of my game (Their official WP7 SDK will be avialable in a few days, and you can download it from http://dev.skiller-games.com). I totally recommend it.

Good Luck.