Windows Phone 7 Unlocked Emulator

If are not pleased with the emulator that shipped with the Windows Phone 7 developer tools then here's a quick way to replace the trimmed down emulator with the full version

1) Create a back up of your current emulator image file, to avoid re-installing the developer tools if in case anything goes wrong. This file will be under [PROGRAM FILES (x86)]\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v7.0\Emulator\Images\ and is called WM70C1.en-US.bin

2) Find and download an unlocked image in your search engine of choice, search for WM70C1.en-US.unlocked :)

3) Once downloaded, Copy the unlocked emulator image to [PROGRAM FILES (x86)]\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v7.0\Emulation\Images\

4) Rename the unlocked emulator image to WM70C1.en-US.bin

5) Run the emulator :)

If all goes well you should be able to run the unlocked emulator and it should look like this:



I would advise to make sure that you can deploy and debug applications with Visual Studio. If not then you probably found an older version of the unlocked emulator image and you should try to search again for a newer version.