My Focus-themed Windows Phone emulator theme

Posted 5 April 2011   Tweet

I’ve received a lot of people asking around on Twitter and other places for the emulator theme that I use with the Windows Phone developer tools. I created these one slow evening at home, sharing on my blog now. Use at your own risk, it’s unofficial to replace this sort of thing.

What it looks like

Pretty basic, looks like a Focus phone with your favorite American carrier! If that scares you, there’s always a little Photoshop magic possible to blend away the brand.

Download the bits

489 KB Zip: JeffsEmulatorTheme.zip

How to install

Simple process.

• Extract the Zip
• Overwrite (will require elevation) the files in your Windows Phone Emulator folder (on a 64-bit machine, this is “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft XDE\1.0\”)
• Re-launch the emulator

Only side effect with this one is that the emulator “toolbar” is another 20px or so to the right than the old one, and overall the skin is larger – but it looks great, is nice for screenshots, and if you have a large screen it’s the way to go!

Hope you enjoy it,
Jeff