In this article we are going to see how to register a Windows Phone Physical Device that can be used as a developer device for application development. As a Windows Phone developer we need to test the final version on the physical device even though we test a lot in the emulator to get the real feel on how your application reacts. So the option is to deploy the apps to the Windows Phone we need to register the phone for development which will be mapped in your Microsoft Windows Phone Developer account and then we can install and debug the application for both Windows Phone 7.1 and Windows Phone 8 devices. [more]
To register the Windows Phone device to the developer account there is a tool called Windows Phone Developer Registration ( a stand alone tool ) which will be installed by default while installing the Windows Phone SDK ( available in both versions 7.1 and 8.0). As a prerequisite you need to have a valid Microsoft account and a Windows Phone developer account. Each developer account has a limitation to register only 3 devices for application development and if any existing device which is already used with a name it will be reflecting to accept with a new device name. In order to register a phone which is running Windows Phone OS 7.1 we need to use the Zune Software which can be downloaded from the Microsoft website.
Let use see the steps on how to register the device to the Windows Phone developer account, follow the below steps one by one to get this done easily.
Steps to Register:
- Connect your Windows Phone device to the Developer machine using a USB cable.
- Make sure the phone is switched on and no in lock stage (if locked, then unlock it by sliding).
- Open the Windows Phone Developer Registration stand alone tool from the list of programs installed as shown in the screen below.
- Click on register to proceed with the registration, we can see a page open where we need to input the Microsoft account credentials to which the developer account is mapped as shown in the screen below.
- Clicking on register again will register the phone successfully and shows the message that the Windows Phone is registered with out any issues as shown in the screen below.
Now we can use this device to deploy any application that is developed and test it without any limitations. Now once the development is done to un register the device follow the steps below.
Steps to UnRegister:
- To unregister the device, connect the phone again to the development machine and open the Windows Phone Developer registration stand alone tool from the list of programs installed as shown in the screen below.
- Click on the Unregister button at the bottom will once again open a windows to authenticate the account. Input the Microsoft account which we used to register and click on Unregister button again as shown in the screen below.
- We can see a popup checking if we want to proceed with the un-registration request to not map the device with this developer account as shown in the screen below.
- Clicking on continue will start the process and gives a success message on removing the registration information for this device from the registered developer account as shown in the screen below.