Windows Phone 7 Console window on 64 bit Machine

A while ago as part of my post http://nicksnettravels.builttoroam.com/post/2010/07/24/Howe28099s-my-Windows-Phone-7-application-being-used-Getting-started-with-the-Microsoft-Silverlight-Analytics-Framework-for-Windows-Phone-development.aspxdiscussed how you can enable the console window for the Windows Phone 7 emulator. since I upgraded my machine to 64bit windows I haven't got around to enabling the console window but today I decided to give it a shot. now my previous post stated that you just needed the following registry entry:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ xde]
"Enableconsole" = DWORD: 00000001

However, this wasn' t working for me .... And actually the xde key didn't even exist. Of course, I'm running a 64 bit machine and a lot of the Windows Phone 7 SDK runs in 32 bit mode. Doh! Shocould have realized that of course I 'd need to alter the registry key to the following (note the additional wow6432node key)

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ wow6432node \ Microsoft \ xde]
"Enableconsole" = DWORD: 00000001

Now I can run the console window and write to it using console. writeline (as an alternative to debug. writeline which appears in the Visual Studio debug output window ).

Eg console. writeline ("application loaded ");