A couple of weeks ago, Joe Belfiore confirmed that Microsoft is not “focusing” on Windows 10 Mobile anymore, essentially giving up the whole phone strategy of Microsoft. While Redmond is not officially retiring the platform, Belfiore told us that there will be no new features and no new devices, suggesting to switch to competing platforms. I almost instantly commented that it is a huge error made by Microsoft that had and has the resources to run a niche mobile platform while it waits for “the new generation of mobile devices”, as they call it.

The first casualty of that error could be the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) framework that promised to help developers to design applications for “any form factor” Windows 10 was running onto. However, with the retirement of Windows 10 Mobile and without any viable alternative for the smartphone-sized form factor, what would the word “any” mean ? While the UWP platform also includes Xboxes, IoT and holographic devices (Hololens and compatible devices), it is easy to understand that the big share of devices that could be interested in UWP apps were the desktop+mobile ones.

Xboxes, holographic and especially IoT devices for sure will feature a completely different class of apps and it will be not so common to have UWP software running the very same application on IoT devices AND desktop ones. Sure, Spotify could be useful on Xbox but since .NET is the common development framework for both Win32 and UWP there’s already a baseline of code that could be shared across the different versions of Windows-based applications and Win32 recently had access to the UWP-specific APIs too.

Xboxes, holographic and especially IoT devices for sure will feature a completely different class of apps and it will be not so common to have UWP software running the very same application on IoT devices AND desktop ones.

No-one was thinking that Win32 was going anywhere soon because Microsoft is sane and it will not cut the tie to hundreds of millions of applications just to turn itself into a new OS X but the fact that Win32 will come to ARM devices, in my opinion, makes even less important to dig into UWP ecosystem. The very fact that Microsoft not only ensured to move the Win32 ecosystem onto the boat of ARM devices but also ensured that such apps could be packaged for the store and also enabled its access to UWP APIs means that the adoption of that universal platform is not moving as fast as initially expected.

While there could be some technical reasons for that, the main point here is just that the mobile demise made less important to switch to a somewhat limited and entire new platform just to create apps that would run on desktops anyway. .NET standard 2.0 that has been recently released will help put UWP apps on par with .NET framework ones but it’s difficult to understand whom such apps are aimed to now that mobile is no more.

Don’t get me wrong: I [...]

If you’re anything like me, virtualization has a great and important role in your everyday work. I use to virtualize most of my development machines, with Visual Studio and the whole stack. That allows me to avoid reconfiguring the environments whenever I need to switch my main machine, plus you get all the benefits of virtualization like for example the ability to backup the whole machine and move it elsewhere.

Up until now, such deployments had just one limitation: you could not use them to run mobile apps since nested virtualization was not supported on Windows 8 or Windows Server 2012 R2 so you could not run emulators that needed Hyper-V. Things changed with Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 since nested virtualization is now allowed so I thought that was perfect chance to redeploy machines I used for mobile development into VMs.

So Visual Studio 2015 is running and Xamarin ready, you create a new Xamarin Forms project and you want to test that your environment is working fine. You start debug for the Android application but the Visual Studio Android emulator is not working. A “Hyper-V component is not running” :

Something happened while starting a virtual machine: ‘VS Emulator 5-inch KitKat (4.4) XXHDPI Phone.macoswin’ failed to start. (Virtual machine ID 77D02994-C4A1-4A43-9AE7-7E55C03521D4) The Virtual Machine Management Service failed to start the virtual machine ‘VS Emulator 5-inch KitKat (4.4) XXHDPI Phone.macoswin’ because one of the Hyper-V components is not running (Virtual machine ID 77D02994-C4A1-4A43-9AE7-7E55C03521D4). _

Hyper-V seems to be working fine plus it has been installed, something that never succeeded in past Windows (Server) versions but emulators don’t work. The reason for this is your host is not enabling all Hyper-V features to the guest machine. That’s probably related to the fact that Hyper-V is also needed for Containers but I’m not sure about that.

Turns out that you need to tell host that you want to expose ALL Hyper-V functionalities if you want to enable full nested virtualization so you have to log into the host (which might simply be your own notebook or desktop PC or even a Surface Pro, like in my case) and run this command using an elevated shell:

Set-VMProcessor -VMName <VMName> -ExposeVirtualizationExtensions $true

<VMName> obviously is the name of the virtual machine that you want to enable nested virtualization for. Also ensure that such VM has been shut down (no saving, no suspension). Once you reboot, emulators will start working. You might need to re-deploy the emulators VMs just to ensure that everything will be redeployed in a smooth way. You simply need to delete those emulators inside Hyper-V Manager.

The problem is: when you will deploy your test app – even the simplest one, the one generated by the template – it will not run inside the emulator. It just starts and shuts down almost instantly, probably crashing.

To fix this problem, you need to change a setting in the virtual machine that is hosting Visual Studio and the emulators as well:

Again, you need to shut the VM down before changing [...]