Today is an exciting day at Build – the Windows 8.1 Preview is available for download! If you’re like me, you can’t wait to update your machine to take advantage of everything delivered in the new release. http://www.preview.windows.com/

Among the enhancements and changes in Windows 8.1, it looks like the team made some changes that affect Hyper-V, creating a compatibility issue with the Windows Phone emulator (XDE) included in the Windows Phone SDK 8.0. Thankfully, this is quickly fixed with Visual Studio 2012 Update 3.

When you start up the Windows Phone 8.0 emulator on your newly updated machine, you’ll likely be greeted with the following dialog box from the Windows Program Compatibility Assistant, informing you that the emulator has compatibility issues:

To resolve the issue, you need to install the Visual Studio 2012 Update 3 (hereafter simply referred to as VSU3 for the sake of brevity). Among all the goodness in the update that RTM’d today, VSU3 includes an update that enables the XDE to install and work on Windows 8.1. And, in case you’re curious, you should be able to install VSU3 either before you install the Windows 8.1 Preview or after…as long as you install it before you use the emulator again, you’re all good.

To install VSU3, you can either download it from the Microsoft Download Center page, or you install it from within the Visual Studio 2012 environment. To install VSU3 from within VS2012, follow the following steps:

From within Visual Studio 2012, select the ‘Extensions and Updates…’ option from the ‘Tools’ menu

Within ‘Extensions and Updates’, you want to navigate into the ‘Updates’ section and select ‘Product Updates’, which should provide you with the option to update Visual Studio to VSU3

Click ‘Update’ and let the update roll

Regardless of the update path you take, you can kick off the upgrade and grab a coffee (or, in my case, a Slurpee) and let it run for awhile. After it completes, we’re once again on the happy path and the emulator launches just fine!

I hope this blog post helps you out,

Cliff

[Edit Jul-1-2013: I modified this post to remove some dialogs that I encountered when I was installing VSU3 RC2 and also to add in how to install the update from within Visual Studio; thanks to those who provided these suggestions!]