When you build a new Windows Store app, you need to debug, deploy and test the app. Visual Studio provides you the following three options to debug and test your app (see Figure 1).
- Simulator
- Local Machine
- Remote Machine
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Figure 1. Visual Studio Debugging Options
Simulator
The Visual Studio simulator for Windows Store apps is a desktop application that simulates a Windows Store app. The simulator mimics the real device experience on your local machine. The simulator also has options for choosing the physical screen size and resolution that you want to emulate and for simulating the geo-location co-ordinates of user input events and properties.
Local Machine
Local machine is the machine where you have Visual Studio installed and you write code. To debug, test, or run performance analysis on a Windows Store app, you can run the app on the same machine that hosts Visual Studio. If the display on the device is touch-enabled then you can exercise the full functionality of the app; otherwise, you will be limited to mouse and keyboard gestures.
Remote Machine
If your development machine that is running Visual Studio does not have Windows 8 touch-enabled user input capabilities then you have an option to use a remote machine to debug and test your app.
To set up a remote machine debugging, go to the Project Properties, select Debug and select Remote Machine in the Target Device drop down. See Figure 2.
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Figure 2. Remote Machine Debugging Options
This option will enable the Remote machine TextBox and a Find button to find the remote machine.
Summary
In this article, I talked about various options available in Visual Studio 2013 to debug and test Windows Store apps.