Deploying a XAP to the emulator without Visual Studio.
If you'd like to be able to deploy your applications to the Windows Phone emulator without using Visual Studio SlyGamer posted information on how to do it in the Windows Phone 7 forum.
His reason for wanting to install without Visual Studio is that others that he works with must be able to install the application without getting their hands on the entire source tree. Using the Process Manager he checked to see what Visual Studio 2010 Express was doing to get this information. The command line that it uses is as follows:
wp.exe" install "file.xap" "app Id" "GameThumbnail.png" "XapCacheFile.xml" /clean
We are submitting builds of our WP7 XNA project to our publisher and needed a way to deliver the build without sending them the entire source tree and have them build it in VS2010 just to get it in the emulator. I hadn't seen any discussion about it in here or other forums/blogs, so with Process Explorer I had a peek at what VS2010 does.
"%XNAGSv4%\Tools\wp.exe" install "file.xap" "app Id" "GameThumbnail.png" "XapCacheFile.xml" /clean
wp.exe is the command-line Windows Phone management tool. You can see many other features by running it without any parameters. file.xap is created by VS2010 and is found in the output directory.
It will deploy to the default device (usually the emulator unless you have hardware). You can deploy to a different device using the /device: option where id is found by running "wp.exe devices".
I thought this might help someone who also needed a way to manually deploy a .xap to the emulator.
app Id is the Guid found in Properties\AssemblyInfo.cs.GameThumbnail.png is found in the output directory.XapCacheFile.xml is found in the intermediate directory.
Tags: Windows Phone