Microsoft released a new set of Windows Phone 8 emulators for the Windows Phone developers to support development environments for both WP8 Update 2 and Update 3 release. If you are targeting your apps for a large screen display, must try out them in the new emulator before submitting for certification.
Let’s discuss little on the new set of emulators in this post. You will also find the appropriate links towards the Microsoft Download Centre to install them in your development environment.
There are no big changes in Windows Phone 8 Update 2 emulator images. It has been updated to target Visual Studio 2013 RTM bits. If you already have the update 2 images, you can skip downloading this set. This set has support for 720P, WXGA, WVGA, WVGA 512 MB range of Windows Phone 8 devices, as shown here.
The Windows Phone 8 Update 3 set has an additional emulator image targeting 1080P HD devices and requires Visual Studio 2012 Update 3 or Visual Studio 2013 RTM. This will help you to test your apps against larger screen displays (1080 X 1920 resolution).
Here are the links for you to download the new set of emulator images for Windows Phone 8 GDR2 and GDR3:
* Download Update 2 Emulators
* Download Update 3 Emulators
To install these updates, you must have Windows Phone 8.0 SDK installed and your developer environment supports SLAT. Installing this packages will not replace or update your existing emulator images.
You might be interested reading this post too: “What is SLAT and How to Check whether your CPU Supports it?”
Enjoy building apps for Windows Phone 8 and share your tremendous works with us and the entire community and consumers. Do let us know if you have any queries. Connect with me on Twitter and Facebook for any kind of technical discussions and/or to get the regular updates. Cheers.