Why is my game not installed in the Windows Phone emulator?
If you’re familiar with the Windows Phone Emulator, one of the great things about it is that you can install apps like you would a phone and run them outside of a debugging session. This is useful for me to show “fancy” demos at a trade show running in the emulator. It may be useful for you if you have a similar situation in that you wanted to show off your games to colleagues, take some video, etc.
By default XNA Framework games are designed to integrate into the Games Hub, so when you deploy a game it’s actually installed in a place you can’t get to. This is easily remedied by changing the configuration of your games Genre.
From the Visual Studio Solution Explorer open up the Properties folder and then open the WindowsPhoneManifest.xml file.
- Locate the Genre property, which by default is set to Apps.Games. This means by default that this application would be installed in the Game Hub.
- Set the genre to something different, note for a default Silverlight application this is NormalApp i.e. Genre=”NormalApp”
Once you’ve deployed your game to the emulator after changing the Genre, you should now see your game appear in the normal application list. Once you’re done deploying your game on the Windows Phone emulator you may want to change your Genre back to “Apps.Games” for when you get to run your game on a device or you submit the game for publishing!
-Michael
i want to know more about safety new Windows phone. I dont want to start developing my apps if there will be possibility to hack your software. And as we can see there are already some hack for phone 7 emulator.
I would love to read some article about phone safety.
Yes I needed to know this!
I would had thought that by having a "secret" compartment in anything is bad practice!
What's a "secret compartment"? The games hub isn't available in the public emulator, that's all. And all games install into that hub. All this does is allow you to install it into the list of applications on the device instead.
The games hub isn't "secret" in any way, it's just not (currently) in the public emulator.
does that mean that all games (even indie games with no xbox live support) will show up in the game hub and not in the applications list? just want to make sure im clear.. should people only make use of this change for testing, or is this meant to be used for applications that go the XNA route? thanks for the insight!
Yes all games are listed in the Games Hub. You'll find the LIVE enabled games in the collection list and "other games" right below in the same list.