Windows 8 Simulator command line interface

Question

I know VS2012 has the ability to start the Windows Simulator right out of the editor.
What I want/need is to be able to 'tell the simulator' to start a specific app. So let's say I have a previously compiled (Metro) app, it could be C# or HTML, and I want to tell the Simulator to Start and run my specific app. Is that possible?

Let's say I'm also in a Windows 7 box, and I want to try it out. I know I can't do that on the Win7 box so I thought I would connect to a Windows8 VM via Remote Destop and either start the simulator there to see how my app works, or as mentioned before, start the simulator with my app.

So is that all possible? How would I do it? Does anybody can think of a better idea to achieve that? Say powershell to send my app to the Win8 machine?

Answer 1

You can find the Simulator executable at ...

C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Windows Simulator\11.0

Looking at Windows.Simulator.exe with ILSpy, however, it appears that the only startup command it looks for is /Minimized. If you check out OnStartup, it contains the code ...

if (App.ParseStartAsMinimized(e.Args))
{
    window.WindowState = WindowState.Minimized;
}

That's the only one I could find. I also didn't find a place where it tried to access its configuration file. It does reference System.Configuration, however, so maybe some additional detective work is warranted.