Deploying your first app to the emulator

To make sure that everything works fine, we will first see if we can deploy the app to the HoloLens emulator. If you have decided not to install this and choose to use a physical device instead, please skip to the next part.

In the menu bar, you can choose the environment you want to run the app on. You might be familiar with this, but if you are not, this is where you specify where the app will be deployed. You have several options, such as the local machine and a remote machine. Those two are the most used in normal development, such as if you are writing a universal Windows platform application or a website, but that will not work for us. We need to deploy the app to a Holographic capable device such as the emulator. If you have installed that, it will show up here in the menu, as follows:

The version of the emulator might be different on your system--Microsoft continuously updates its software, so you might have a newer version. The one shown here is the latest one that was available during the writing of this book.

Now that you have selected this, you can select Run (through the green arrow, pressing F5, or through the Debug | Start Debugging menu). If you do that the emulator will start up. This might take some time. After all, it is starting up a new machine in the Hyper-V environment, loading Windows 10, and deploying your app.

However, after a couple of minutes, you will be greeted with the following view:

You will see a rotating multicolored cube on a black background.