No windows phone emulators found after upgrading to Windows 10

2
votes

The issue

I'm encountering an issue when I try to start my Windows Phone Silverlight 8.1 application after I updated my visual studio.

Description

Updating to Windows 10 broke my Visual Studio Express 2013's Windows Phone 8.1 emulators so I figured I'd install the Visual Studio 2015 Community edition. I also uninstalled all of the Windows Phone SDK's and emulators, figuring I'd start with a clean install.

Now I'm using Visual Studio 2015 and the result of this is that I don't have a single emulator that I can use to debug my Windows Phone application anymore. I've installed the Windows Phone 8.1 Emulators, Windows Phone SDK 8.0 and a Windows 10 emulator.

When I press the start button's (the one with the green arrow) dropdown box I only get the start option where the names of the various emulators used to be. When I press the start button I get the exception you can see below.

enter image description here

What I've tried and checked

  • Hyper-v is installed and working
  • Reinstalling the emulators & SDK's
  • Restarting my computer
  • Creating a new project
  • Installing Visual Studio Express 2013 for Windows
  • Creating different types of Windows Phone solutions.
  • Cannot deploy to my phone
  • Deleting all my old emulator virtual machines in Hyper-V Manager

I have tried to include as much relevant information as possible. But I will be happy to provide more if required.

2
visual-studiowindows-phone-8visual-studio-2015windows-10windows-phone-8-emulator
But you didn't uninstall/reinstall visual studio? – user1228
@Will well no, but I have tried installing Visual Studio 2013 Express and I don't have any emulators in VS2013 either – Fester
Protip: this isn't normal. That's usually indicative of something anomalous on your end. One possibility is that something got screwed up on install. Try reinstalling VS. That means, uninstall everything VS related, then reinstall it. It doesn't mean installing other versions. – user1228
@Will Yes I thought the same thing. Although I already tried uninstalling everything and reinstalling it when I installed Windows 10 I'll give it another go. – Fester
Yeah, sucks, but trying to put humpty back together again isn't always an option. – user1228

2 Answers

0
votes

Amongst all the visual studio versions so far visual studio 2015 is causing heartburning issues with developers it appears. you could try reinstalling 8.1 emulator update using https://www.microsoft.com/en-in/download/details.aspx?id=43719 . This should restore your win 8.1 Emulators . Do a checksum on your visual studio 2015 Download using https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/841290 to see if your visual studio 2015 downloads are not corrupt.

0
votes

The answer that solved the problem was posted in the comments, so I'm reposting it here for completeness sake.

Uninstalling everything Windows Phone & Visual Studio related and installing it again fixed the issue.