In my previous post on Windows Phone 8.1 Developer Power Tools I looked at the developer power tools that are available from within Visual Studio. In this post we’ll look at the new Windows Phone 8.1 emulator and how it is an enabler for building better applications. The first thing to note is that there are a number of different emulator images available:

In this brave new world of varying screen sizes Windows Phone 8.1 departs from the fixed addressable width of 480 units. Instead each device has a scale factor which results in an effective resolution – in essence this means that two devices of the same size but differing hardware resolution will display the same amount of content, whereas two devices with the same resolution but differing size, will show more/less content depending on their relative size. What this means is that we now need emulators that not only vary in resolution but also in size.

Here you can see both the WVGA 4inch and the 1080p 6inch alongside each other – the beauty of it being in an emulator is that it can then be resized on the screen. The thing to notice is that the 1080p emulator has an additional column of tiles which will be a typical behaviour within applications when dealing with a higher effective resolution.

The next thing to note are the additional tools that are available. Here is a quick set of screenshots – we’ll go into more details on each of these in coming posts: