Windows Phone 8 Beginner's tutorial (ix) Windows Phone 8 emulator overview

Original address:

http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Windows-Phone-8-Development-for-Absolute-Beginners/ Part-9-overview-of-the-windows-phone-8-emulator

Source code: HTTP://AKA.MS/ABSBEGINNERDEVWP8

PDF version: Http://aka.ms/absbeginnerdevwp8pdf

We have used the Windows Phone emulator in this series. It's a key component in developing the Windows Phone platform application, so I'd like to take the time to get to know it further and point out the direction for more information.

The plan for this lesson is:

We'll see what the Winows phone simulator is, and how it can provide different versions for different deployment scenarios.

We'll look at the simulator's capabilities, including the keyboard shortcuts for simulating device buttons.

We will learn how to resize, rotate, and simulate the behavior of physical devices on virtual devices, just as virtual devices support accelerometers, GPS, and so on.

1. What is Windows phone simulator?

In short, the Windows Phone emulator is a desktop application that simulates Windows Phone devices and provides performance similar to the physical Windows Phone device. It provides a virtualized environment that allows you to debug and test your Windows Phone application without a physical device. In fact, as I said in the first installment of Windows Phone 8, it runs Microsoft Hyper-V. To get more information about Hyper-V on Windows 8, you can refer to this blog from the Windows 8 team

Bring Hyper-V to winows 8 (bringing Hyper-V to "Windows 8")
Http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/07/bringing-hyper-v-to-windows-8.aspx

While the simulator is very effective for development and rapid debugging, Microsoft recommends that you test your application on a real phone before you post the application to the WindowsPhone App Store.

2. Choose different versions of the simulator for debugging

So far, when we click the Run/Debug button on the Visual Studio toolbar, we run the simulator under the default configuration, known as wvga512m.

What does WVGA and 512MB mean?

512M indicates that we are running in a memory-constrained environment, the default emulator image in Visual Studio is the WVGA 512M emulator, which simulates a memory-constrained Windows Phone 8 phone. For example, Lumia 610 is a cheap entry-level Windows Phone 8 device that supports only 256MB of memory. Instead Lumia 920 has 1GB of RAM. On low memory devices, it can cause performance problems when multiple applications run at the same time or create a memory-intensive application. So to make sure your application is running well on a low memory device, you can use this real-world emulator image to test your application.

There are a lot of good articles about memory usage on MSDN, and you can start with the following articles for more information:

Windows Phone Application performance considerations (app performance considerations for Windows phone)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsphone/develop/ff967560 (v=vs.105). aspx

Application optimization for Low-cost devices (optimizing Apps for Lower cost Devices)

Http://blogs.windows.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/archive/2012/03/07/optimizing-apps-for-lower-cost-devices.aspx

What does "WVGA" and other abbreviations stand for?

The emulator allows you to test your application on a unique emulator image for each screen resolution supported by Windows Phone. The default selection encourages you to position your Windows Phone 8 application target in the largest market.

WVGA (800x480)

WXGA (1280x768)

720p (1280x720)

If you are running in the default state, then go to the Setup application and click on the about, you will see the screen resolution at this time is 480x800:

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