Windows Phone 8 emulator doesn't show the actual state of its OS

Question

Problem:

When I start Windows Phone 8 emulator it launches a virtual machine in Hyper-V. After a few minutes Windows Phone OS gets loaded (I can connect to it through Hyper-V manager (it's inconvenient to play with WP this way though)), but the emulator keeps reporting: "The Windows Phone OS is starting...".

After some time (apparently timeout happens) deployment from Visual Studio fails with error: "App deployment failed. Please try again."

How I got here?

Everything works fine when I use wifi connection and have a dynamic ip address. Emulator works properly and I have internet in Windows Phone OS.

But unfortunately most of the time I have to use Ethernet connection with a static IP address (which is assigned to me by internet provider based on my MAC address). And in this case there is no internet in Windows Phone emulator. As far as I understand, virtual machine in Hyper-v connects to the network with a kind of it's own ethernet card(another MAC address) and have a different ip address. In that case it won't get any internet from my provider. And even if the emulator would have the same MAC and IP address it will create a mess for internet traffic.

So my laptop should be a router for WP emulator. That's why I make sharing of my primary internet (ICS) with a Windows Phone emulator switch (vEthernet (Internal Ethernet Port Windows Phone Emulator Internal Switch)). In this case I do have have an internet on Windows Phone, but when I connect through Hyper-V manager only. In Emulator it doens't even show when the OS gets loaded.

After I stop sharing of the internet with Windows Phone emulator switch, the emulator itself is working perfectly.. but with no internet.

Any ideas how to make windows phone emulator work with my type of internet connection?

Answer 1

Here is a good resource from Microsoft on Troubleshooting the Windows Phone 8 Emulator.

Follow the instructions and hopefully it should solve your problem

The Cannot connect to network destinations or to Internet sites section of the link, should address your problem.

Update:

One more solution from another site,

"Go into Hyper-V Manager from your start screen. Go into the Virtual Switch Manager. See if a virtual switch with the name "Windows Phone Emulator Internal Switch", if not Create a virtual switch called "Windows Phone Emulator Internal Switch". And Make it's connection type 'Internal'."

Do all this before launching the Emulator. And if that did not solve your problem, remove the existing switch and create the new one again.

If still that didnot solve your problem, here is a good discussion about the similar problem .. check that. Windows Phone 8 emulator can't connect to the internet

Answer 2

I think I got the answer for this issue from Microsoft forum.

DHCP is clearly a requirement for windows phone emulator (it's listed as a requirement for SDK). And if you have a static IP address it's not possible for you to have internet on your windows phone emulator.. even with Internet Connection Sharing.

Possible solutions I can see:

1. Install Windows 8 with Hyper-V and Emulator in some other virtual machine (VMware, VirtualBox)
2. Install some proxy (Not sure if it will work. I think it would be difficult to configure.)
3. Buy a router. This seems to be the easiest solution. I would recommend this to everyone and not to waste that much time on this as I did :)