In this article we are going to see how to deploy the application to Windows Phone Emulator from Visual Studio IDE. Windows Phone Emulator is a virtual device used test the application once developed by deploying directly and test the features. Deploying the application to Windows Phone Emulator can be done easily by selecting option from the Visual Studio IDE. When the deployment begins first the Windows Phone Emulator starts and then it loads the Windows Phone Operating system based on the version the application is targeted.  [more]

Once the Operating System is loaded the application will be deployed and opened in the emulator to test it locally. In parallel if the emulator is already opened then the app will directly install to the Operating System with out any changes. Let us see how we can achieve this task step by step, Open Visual Studio IDE in administrator mode and create a new Windows Phone project with a valid name as shown in the screen below.

Clicking on OK will create the project and the solution with the list of default files and folders that are required to run the application. It will take some time to create these files based on your system configuration, so once everything is ready we can see the Visual Studio IDE with the project as shown in the screen below.

Now lets assume that our application is ready and available to deploy to the emulator, to start with first build the application in debug or release mode and select the option of the Target from the Standard tool bar in the top ribbon menu as shown in the screen below.

Here we see only 4 Emulator options as we selected the target version as Windows Phone OS 8.0 and if we select the earlier version which is 7.1 then some of the emulator which supports the version will also be shown in the list. Now select the appropriate emulator configuration and click on the Play button or click simply F5 button to build and execute the application in the Emulator as shown in the screen below.

We can see the project will configure the build and start the application in a Virtual device like Windows Phone in your local development machine with the application as shown in the screen below. Now the application is ready to test which is like a physical device mode.