DANIEL VAUGHAN

Resolving The Issue Emulator Not Able To Connect To The Windows Phone Os

31 Oct 2012

The Windows Phone 8.0 SDK is out, and while most sink their teeth into its cavalcade of new features, a few may encounter a small road bump when moving to the RTW version; as I did.

After moving from a pre-release version of the Windows Phone 8 SDK to the RTW, I found that I was unable to launch the Windows Phone emulator because of a networking issue. The emulator would pop up the following error message at the beginning of a debugging session:

The Windows Phone Emulator wasn’t able to connect to the Windows Phone operating system: The emulator couldn’t determine the host IP address, which is used to communicate with the guest virtual machine. Some functionality may be disabled.

This turned out to be a hair pulling exercise. The cause was related to the Hyper-v virtual switch configuration.

I resolved the issue by performing the following steps:

  1. Uninstall the Windows Phone 8.0 SDK.
  2. Uninstall and reinstall the virtual switches using:
    C:> netcfg -u vms_pp
    C:> netcfg -c p -i vms_pp
  3. Reboot
  4. Reinstall the SDK.

If you encounter the same issue, here’s hoping this post sorts you out.