The Windows Phone Emulator Rocks! – Try This

Open the Windows Phone Emulator, launch Internet Explorer and type localhost:

image   image

 

This means that you can have a WCF service sitting in localhost on your desktop and access it directly in code or configuration file via localhost without having to jump through hoops to access the desktop IIS via IP address.  In fact, you don’t have to configure networking at all.  it just works.

 

Game Development in the Emulator

You can also run XNA games in the Windows Phone emulator as well with great performance because the emulator takes advantage of the desktop GPU to help match the performance you will see when running on physical device.

 

Testing Touch Input in the Emulator

If you have a multi-touch monitor, you can use it with the Windows Phone emulator to simulate touch on a device.