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WP Emulator Crashing on Windows 8? Here's a Fix

  • Article

Don't you just hate it when you upgrade to a new OS (even when it's a beta) and everything works amazingly well, except for that one critical bit of infrastructure that just fails? That's kind of how you might be feeling if you boot up your brand spanking new Windows 8 install, install VS 2010 and the WP 7.1 SDK, followed by the 7.1.1. update to get the emulator and Tango support, boot up your project - hit F5... drum roll... emulator crashes. Sigh.

Luckily, there's an easy fix!

Rename all of the *.dess files under %systemdrive%\programdata\Microsoft\XDE and restart the emulator, and all should be good.

What's going on?  

For some reason the saved state of the emulator is getting corrupted, by renaming these files (which could probably be safely deleted) you're forcing the emulator to recreate them (shutdown may be a little slower the first time you close the emulator).

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 26, 2012
    Rename the files to what?

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2012
    Anything :) The idea is just not to delete them, just in case you need them later. Renaming them will mean the emulator can't find the files and will do a full cycle reboot which should solve your issue.

  • Anonymous
    March 17, 2013
    The comment has been removed