The Windows Phone emulator is a desktop application and it simulates touch and rotation events and chooses the physical screen size that a physical device provides.
Adding to these features, Windows Phone SDK 8.1 comes with many features, such as Optional SD card location, accelerometer, networking and notifications.
To use a SD card we will start the emulator from Visual Studio as in the following:
- Open Visual Studio 2013
- Create a new project or if you have an existing Windows Phone project you can open that
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- On the Standard toolbar, select one of the following emulator options:
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- Choose Emulator.
- Click F5 (Start Debug) and it may take a few minutes to launch the Emulator.
- Click on the 2 right facing arrows called "Tools" on the toolbox in the right hand side of the Emulator.
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- This will open up a window called "Additional Tools". Click on the tab "SD Card" to use the removable SD card.
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Insert a folder from the development computer.
Click Browse to pick the folder on the computer to hold the contents of the simulated SD card and click on Insert SD card. Until now everything is fine and cool. But there are the following few more things you need to consider here:
- If the folder's path you specified or the folder is not valid then an error will occur.
- If the folder is valid then the specified folder on the computer is copied to the root folder of the simulated SD card of the emulator with an indication of the progress.
- The Insert the SD card button changes to Eject SD card.
- If you click Eject SD card while the sync operation is in progress, the operation is canceled.
Optionally, select or clear the Sync updated files back to the local folder when I eject the SD card. That copies the files on the simulated SD card to the specified folder when you click on the Eject SD card.
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Now we can access the file from the SD card using the FileOpenPickerContinuationEventArgs class. In my next article I will explain how to "Access the file from a SD Card".
Note: The maximum size of a SD card is 32GB, since it is the phone's SD card formatted with the FAT32 system.