Problems with Windows Phone 8.1 emulator

Question

I am having really difficult time to cope up with the windows phone emulator. My ultimate goal is to deploy my application and sniff http requests through fiddler. I am on Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 on Windows 8.1

Problems which i face

1. Sometimes the emulator does not start at all and gets stuck "Window Phone OS is starting ".

   Here first i get the message of "Attempting to modify switch settings" info dialog. I clicked on ok. Then i get Error dialog of "Windows Phone emulator is unable to connect to the windows phone operating system" "Object reference not set to an instance of an object "(Internal c# error). I click close and it gets stuck at "Windows Phone OS is starting".

2. if i get past this problem and my application gets deployed. I cannot connect to internet. Even a link in browser does not open.
3. Now for the rarest of rare times i am able to connect to internet. I am in no way able to sniff http request.

But sniffing is still my secondary problem, but my first issue is to get the emulator run and connect to internet.

Steps which i have performed to troubleshoot.

1. Hyper-V as a Windows feature is turned on.
2. My firewalls have been disabled.
3. I have removed the virtual machines and switch created by Hyper-V manager and let it be created through Visual Studio.
4. In network connections, disabled and enabled the vEthernet (Windows Phone emulator switch ).
5. Have also tried ipconfig/renew.

Have gone through lot of msdn posts, blogs, so questions but the behaviour of emulator is pretty inconsistent.

Is there any way i can get emulator logs/info ?

Any help to direct to me to any direction will be hugely appreciated.

UPDATE only thing which is consistently working for me right now is disabling Hyper-V windows feature and then enabling it again. Mind the expensive system restarts also. Then adding my user name to Hyper V admin group and then deploying the application. So whenever i am changing my network i have to perform these steps. Definitely not sustainable

UPDATE 1 So now i have fiddler also acting as a man in the middle. Followed the steps here http://blogs.msdn.com/b/wsdevsol/archive/2013/06/05/configure-the-windows-phone-8-emulator-to-work-with-fiddler.aspx. Couple of thing to change here are the port number and to give the ip number instead of host name.

Also have fiddler always start first and then the emulator. Fiddler is able to sniff the requests happening in emulator. But my application http requests are not going through which is fine if i run without fiddler. I am currently looking into this.

Best Regards, Saurav

Answer 1

Have you tried to run Visual Studio as Administrator? Sometimes, the user must have highest privileges to run Hyper-V.