Customize Windows Phone Emulator Skins from Default to Nokia Lumia 800

In this tutorial we will see how to Customize and change the default Windows Phone 7 Emulator skin to Nokia Lumia 800 skin available for download from Telerik. In earlier articles, we have seen how to target the framework and the SDK that is required to build our application and deploy to Windows Phone.

Default Windows Phone 7 Emulator files are available locally in the folder:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft XDE\1.0

In order to download and use the Nokia Lumia 800 skin from Telerik, we need to go to the link with a valid credentials and download the respective files from the list of downloads as shown in the screen below.

Link – http://www.telerik.com/account/your-products/trial-product-versions/trial-single-download.aspx

Now extract the files to a specific folder and open the default Windows Emulator files in another folder. Before we copy the new files to the default location, take a backup of the existing folder for safety. Once we have created the backup of the existing files, copy and paste the Nokia Lumia 800 skin files from the folder which we extracted to the default location as shown in the screens below.

Nokia Lumia 800 Extracted Files:

Default Location:

Once we have copied the files to the default location, now open Visual Studio 2010 IDE and open the project which we have created in our existing article. Build and execute the application and we can see the Nokia Lumia 800 Emulator skin will be opened as shown in the screen below.

Thanks for reading this tutorial and providing continuous support.