Emulator couldn’t determine the host IP address
If you encountered the the error “Emulator couldn’t determine the host IP address” when trying to debug windows phone app in the emulator.
I was working on a Windows Phone app for my Master Degree and i needed to show my desktop to show the app live during a live meeting.
For sharing desktop with my Teammates we use Team viewer because it’s easy to use and no need to install.
So i fired up Team Viewer and then launch push the start button in Visual Studio. The emulator started like every time, but something happened.
A pop up showed up with this as content :
The Windows Phone Emulator wasn’t able to connect to the Windows Phone operating system:
The emulator couldn’t determine the host IP address, which is used to communicate with the guest virtual machine.
Some functionality may be disabled.
So i was like “WTF is happening?”.
I tried every obvious action (restart visual studio, then the pc, select a different emulator, etc…) but nothing worked.
So i started to look around the internet but i found posts like this one talking about re-installing the SDK, it seemed to me to be an extreme solution. Some others posts was talking about Hyper-V, the virtual switch and interferences with VPN software, that something could be wrong around there. So i opened Hyper-V manager and found the Windows Phone emulator and removed it.
My idea was that the emulator should be able to notice that the switch was gone and set it again (like brand new and working) , and that’s what happened.
When i restarted the emulator, it asked for an elevation of privilege and fixed the switch. Now everything is working fine and no more problem with Team Viewer.
So the steps are:
Open Hyper-V Manager
Left column, left click on your computer name
Select Virtual Switch Manager
Select the Windows Phone Emulator Switch
Click on the remove button on the right side of the window.
launch the emulator
Accept the elevation of privilege asked
Now everything should work fine.