Category Archives: Windows 10

Where’s the Windows 10 mobile emulator?

So I’ve been working on some ideas on cross platform .NET development using Visual Studio 2015 and Xamarin. I have the Windows UWP application working fine on Windows 10 but wanted to see how it would look on Windows 10 phone – surprisingly I found the Windows 10 phone emulator didn’t exist as part of the Visual Studio installation (possibly I missed a check box when install or the likes) but it’s easy enough to get.

Just go to Downloads and tools for Windows 10 in the Other download options section there’s a Download the emulator link. From here we can download and install the Windows 10 mobile emulator.

Take a look as Test with the Microsoft Emulator for Windows 10 Mobile Test with the Microsoft Emulator for Windows 10 Mobile also which gives some useful information on using the emulator in different scenarios/configurations.

Strange white on black numbers during debug in Visual Studio 2015

When running a Universal Windows application in debug mode within Visual Studio 2015 I noticed some “strange” white numbers on a black background adorning my application window (and in the case of a desktop application displayed on the top right of the screen).

It seems these are enabled via the App.xaml.cs file, within the OnLaunched method (the code in some cases may appear in the App() constructor according to the documentation) there’s the following code

#if DEBUG
   if(System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached)
   {
      this.DebugSettings.EnableFrameRateCounter = true;
   }
#endif

See also DebugSettings.EnableFrameRateCounter property.

As stated within the above link, this causes an overlay of two sets of numbers. Those in the upper left of the screen/Window relate to the application being debugged those in the upper right apply to the overall system.

Basically the left number is the app’s UI frame rate in frames per second and the right number is the CPU usage of the app’s UI thread per frame in milliseconds.