First look at Windows Simulator

Many friends of mine have been asking me what my team is working on these days. I finally have an opportunity to share with all of you the really cool stuff we’ve been working on for the past many months.

My team built the Windows Simulator enabling users to debug Metro Style apps for Windows 8 in a Windows environment.

There are three primary ways to debug a Metro Style app.

    Local Machine
    Remote Machine
    Simulator

Primary Usage Scenarios for Windows Simulator

There are certain features and traits in Metro style applications that helps them stand out compared to classic windows applications. For a better understanding of Metro Style applications, I strongly recommend viewing the BUILD session by Jensen Harris on 8 traits of great Metro style apps before you start writing any Metro style applications.

The Windows Simulator is really handy when you need to verify how Metro applications measure against these traits. I will introduce them here briefly and later we will have a detailed blog post on each of them.

    Touch Emulation
    Rotation
    Different target screen resolutions
    Contracts

Under the hood

Under the hood the Windows Simulator is a Remote Desktop Session into your local machine.

Developers need to be careful while modifying the state of the operating system in the Simulator because any changes in the Simulator will be reflected on the local machine itself. Multiple instances of Visual Studio and Expression Blend share the same instance of the Windows Simulator.
Using Simulator to debug Metro style applications in Visual Studio

To debug an Metro style application using Windows Simulator, Open the application project in Visual Studio and choose Simulator from the debugging options in the Visual Studio toolbar.

Read more: The Visual Studio Blog
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