running windows phone emulator on windows 8.1 installed on mac bootcamp

Like most of Mobile app developers, I do both windows Store apps and iOS apps. So it is nature that I get a Mac Book and Dual boot windows and Mac OS with Bootcamp.

It is also nature for a window store app developer to extended to Windows Phone app development, after all it is the same C# code and the same XAML stuff.  so I did.

as the documentation said, get the tools installed, I got Visual Studio 2013 Update 3 installed without issue. however when I try to install Windows Phone 8.1 Emulators, I got problem, the following is the screen shot I got.

it complains that the Visualization is not enabled in the BIOS level.  as we are running windows OS under Bootcamp, it is must be something not done write in Bootcamp.

it must be something about how Mac Book handles Visualization with BootCamp.

After some research I found the following walk around, (not solution, I believe the real solution should be from Apple to fix the problem in Boot camp)

1. Boot into Mac OS
2. Got to <Preference> then <Startup Drive>
3. Select Bootcamp partition and click on <Restart>

4. The box will boot with Windows 8.x with Visualization is not enabled
5. Then you can installed Windows Phone 8.1 Emulators without problem

 

 

6. when I first time running windows Phone emulator, it complain that the emulator need to have permission to modify Hyper-V network settings. all it takes is click on <retry> to run the emulator in elevated mode. in another word, run the emulator as local administrator.

7. after that, you will see the beautiful windows Phone emulator.

 

8. The catch here is, everything you want to run WP emulator, you need to boot your windows from <Startup Disks> in Mac OS.