XNA&WP7 development on the emulator: But…Where is my game?

Hi all,

This week, I’ve decided to continue to blog on XNA for Windows Phone 7 as it will be surely useful for some of you in “You make IT smart” ’11. If you already made a game for the Windows phone emulator, you have probably noticed that it doesn’t appear in the application menu along with the Internet Explorer icon. Most of you will probably think of a bug, but it’s not!  Indeed, XNA framework installs the game by default into the game hub, which is not accessible into the emulator.

But don’t worry; it’s still possible to change easily these installation settings in three easy steps:

1.       In the Visual Studio Solution Explorer, open the Properties folder and then open the WindowsPhoneManifest.xml file.

2.       Find the Genre property, which is normally set to Apps.Games. This means by default that this application would be installed in the Game Hub

3.       The genre for a default Silverlight application is NormalApp, so just put Genre=”NormalApp”

This simple manipulation will make appear your game icon into the normal list. Maybe you can do this to test the tile image of your app. If you don’t know how to change this, I reccomand you the blog post from Bob Taco: https://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2010/08/18/how-to-pin-your-game-or-app-in-the-emulator.aspx.

I hope your programs in YMITS ’11 will be great!

Kind regards,

Mikhail