Windows Phone 7 Console Window on 64 bit machine

A while ago as part of my post http://nicksnettravels.builttoroam.com/post/2010/07/24/Howe28099s-my-Windows-Phone-7-application-being-used-Getting-started-with-the-Microsoft-Silverlight-Analytics-Framework-for-Windows-Phone-development.aspxdiscussed how you can enable the console window for the Windows Phone 7 emulator. Since I upgraded my machine to 64bit windows I haven’t got around to enabling the console window but today I decided to give it a shot. Now my previous post stated that you just needed the following registry entry:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\XDE]
"EnableConsole"=dword:00000001

However, this wasn’t working for me…. and actually the XDE key didn’t even exist. Of course, I’m running a 64 bit machine and a lot of the Windows Phone 7 SDK runs in 32 bit mode. Doh! should have realised that of course I’d need to alter the registry key to the following (note the additional Wow6432Node key)

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\XDE]
"EnableConsole"=dword:00000001

Now I can run the console window and write to it using Console.WriteLine (as an alternative to Debug.WriteLine which appears in the Visual Studio debug Output window).

eg Console.WriteLine("Application Loaded");