In this article we are going to see how to use the Windows Phone Power tools (Third Party and not a direct supported by Microsoft) effectively. This tool is an excellent interface which is an extended version of the developer tools that comes out of box with Windows Phone Software Development Kit. This tools is much enhanced compared to the inbuilt developer tool where we can deploy the application and test the XAP files where as here we can deploy the updates as well and test it across for the changes. Also it has some other inbuilt features likes get the list of development apps that are installed to the device or to the emulator, digging through the Isolated Storage of the application installed etc. [more]
This tool is an open source version that is available in Codeplex and can be downloaded free using this link “Download Windows Phone Power Tool” or go to codeplex and search for Windows Phone Power tools and download it directly. This will download the application and install it locally with an One-Click installation procedure as shown in the screens below.
Clicking on Save will save the application locally, run the application will open the Security warning window to install the application which is a third party source and from unverified publisher as shown in the screen below.
Let us click on Install and we can see the application starts installing locally and once its completed we can see the application opens by itself with the list of features in a nice interface as shown in the screen below.
We can select the appropriate option weather to select the Device or the emulator from the list of available options. We will go ahead with selecting the Emulator and we can select the appropriate XAPs and try to deploy it as shown in the screen below.
Click on the Dev apps option in the left side menu which will showcase the installed development apps in the current emulator with the name of the app and the GUID used to differentiate the application. We can use this screen to launch the application or uninstall the application in the emulator or the device as shown in the screen below.
Next feature is the Isolated Storage which we can use to dig through the list of files and folders that are used locally. Also with this feature we can manually put the file or delete the file from the isolated storage to test it locally with out any hassle as shown in the screen below.