Visual Studio 2012 Mobile Emulators

Question

I just returned today with TechEd 2012, where I saw several sectional sessions in which mobile device emulators were shown in a demo. A good example is a Daminan Edwards Dev304 session called “ASP.NET for Mobile and Tablet Development,” where he created the Asp.Net MVC 4 application, then created the _Layout.Mobile file and Index.Mobile file, downloaded JQuery Mobile from NuGet, added style the list in his view and launched the mobile version of his MVC application in the Opera emulator by launching the Opera emulator from the toolbar in Visual Studio 2012.

I downloaded the RC version of Visual Studio 2012 this morning, followed the steps in a conversation with Damian, but cannot figure out how to launch any of the mobile emulators. Can anyone help me with this?

Answer 1

You can download the Opera emulator here: http://www.opera.com/developer/tools/mobile/

It is not part of Visual Studio. Windows Phone Tools will be available later when Windows Phone Tools is updated.

With VS 2012, you have the choice of which browser to use when starting debugging. Next to the green arrow is a drop-down button, the last entry is Browse with... You can add an Opera emulator there, and you can start debugging with this browser (and all the others added earlier).

Answer 2

You can try installing WebMatrix 2, which comes with a set of pseudo-emulators for iPhone, iPad, Windows Phone from memory. Then you can open your project in WebMatrix as a website folder and use its emulators.

http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/

Not the most elegant solution, but it's cheap;)

Answer 3

In VS2012, you can select “Browse with” and select “Add,” and then find the emulator in the WebMatrix installation folder, and you will get both iPhone and iPad emulators.