Now I do appreciate that running prerelease software comes with some risk and I’m also aware that emulators are hard to get working 100% right on every machine. Ever since I can remember there have been connectivity issues with Windows Mobile, Windows Phone and now Windows 10 Mobile emulators; whether connectivity meaning to the internet, the local machine or being able to debug an application. So, it came as no surprise that after rebuilding my computer and installing Visual Studio 2017 RC that my installation of the Visual Studio Android Emulator was semi-broken. Turns out I had two issues I needed to overcome.
When I attempted to launch the emulator, I got the following notice, saying that the Internet Connection needs to be configured – this is pretty typical for first run as Hyper-V needs to setup the virtual switches that the emulator image will use.
After clicking Yes, the emulator is launched and my application is deployed. Unfortunately when Visual Studio attempts to launch the application and attach the debugger, the application closes immediately. This is again an issues I’ve seen before and in fact it appears on the troubleshooting web page for the Android Emulator (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt228282.aspx):
– After you’ve run the emulator image the first time, close the Android Emulator
– Open Hyper-V Manager
– Select the virtual machine that matches the emulator you were attempting to run (make sure it’s in the Off state), and click Settings
– Under Processor –> Compatibility –> check the “Migrate to a physical computer with a different processor version” checkbox
– Click OK
– Important: Make sure you stop and restart the Hyper-V service, otherwise, for some reason the setting is lost the next time you run the emulator.
Having done this I can now deploy and run applications on the emulator. The next issue was that for some reason the emulator couldn’t access the internet. I took a look in the Virtual Switch Manager in Hyper-V Manager (click Virtual Switch Manager from the Actions list on the right side of the Hyper-V Manager management console) and there was only a single “Windows Phone Emulator Internal” switch.
I clicked on New virtual network switch, selected External Access and gave the switch a name:
Each emulator virtual machine needs to have access to both the internal and external switches, so after clicking OK to exit the Virtual Switch Manager, I clicked on the virtual machine that I want to assign the new virtual switch to. Make sure you’ve stopped the virtual machine (closing the Android emulator will do this). Click Settings, click Add Hardware and select Network Adapter and click Add.
From the Virtual switch dropdown, select the virtual switch you just created (External Access in my case), and click OK.
Now launch the emulator (either via the Visual Studio Android Emulator interface that can be launched from the Start menu independently of Visual Studio, or by attempting to run an application from Visual Studio) and you should now have internet access – check via the web browser in the emulator if you’re in any doubt.