How to launch the Windows Phone Emulator without Visual Studio Posted on August 13, 2013

Here’s a simple trick that lets you launch the Windows Phone 8 Emulator without using Visual Studio 2012.

It’s quite simple:

Open “Command Prompt” in Administrator mode (right click on it on the Start page icon, choose Run as administrator)

Launch the emulator using the following command (with quotes): "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft XDE\8.0\xde" -vhd "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v8.0\Emulation\Images\Flash.vhd"

This will launch the Windows Phone emulator so you can easily test you mobile website without going through Visual Studio. As a rule of thumb, Internet Explorer for Windows Phone behaves like its desktop counterpart, but you should still test it just to be sure.