Visual studio 2015 cannot connect to Windows Phone 8.1 emulator

Question

I am facing an issue connecting to a Windows Phone 8.1 emulator from Visual Studio.

Environment:

• Windows 8.1 enterprise
• Visual Studio 2015, update 2
• Cordova 5.3.3

When the error occurs:

• After creating a Cordova project (from the cmd line) for Windows 8 platform (which covers Windows Phone 8.1; not wp8 which covers only WP 7 and 8), I open it in Visual Studio, try to debug it on one of the Windows Phone 8.1 emulators which come with VS (targeted architecture: "Any CPU")

Error:

Right after or during the emulator boot:

• Error message: "Bootstrapper could not connect to machine"
• Two errors in the log of VS: "DEP6701: Boostrapping failed with unexpected error: 'Referenced package not found…" and "DEP0001 : Unexpected Error: DEP0001 : Unexpected error: -1988946668"

What I have tried:

• Turned virtualisation off and on again in the BIOS
• Ensured Hyper-V was enabled
• Checked the emulator for "developer settings" or something similar, but didn't find anything - apparently not required at an emulator level, and anyway it seems unrelated to the error, which suggests VS cannot connect to the emulator
• Changing the connection type of the WP emulator virtual switch in the Hyper-V manager: initially internal network, also tried private network and external network

I am new to Windows Phone development and am kind of out of ideas. Nothing I found on Stack overflow helped. The error seems to suggest the configuration of VS is not adapted to the emulator: it can't connect to it.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Make sure you have installed the Windows Phone 8.1 SDK Update and Emulators, the VS2015 installer (at least the ISO) persists in offering its own obsolete emulators instead of retrieving the updated ones.

I'll never understand the VS2015 installer, it gets some new stuff from the web (like the July-2017 updated Android emulators) and it persists in showing some obsolete SDKs at the same time.

Answer 2

I am seeing the same issue and followed the suggestions above with no effect.

I am running VS2015 Community edition under VMWare Fusion 8.1 and Windows 10 (Windows Update reports all current patches are applied)

The emulator runs fine but the application fails to deploy/run with the same bootstrap error the original poster had.

Windows 10 (all configurations) work fine.