Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Windows Phone 8.1 Project my Screen app now available

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last week I installed the new Windows Phone 8.1 for Developers on my Nokia phone. There were some pretty cool features there with Cortana (the Siri for Windows Phone if you will) getting a lot of attention. And I’ve had some fun with it.
One feature that was almost there was called Project my Screen. I say almost there because while support for it was on the phone it needed an app on the PC to work as I wanted. Well now   the PC application that enables the feature is available to download from Microsoft’s servers. That is a screen shot from my PC of my phone screen on the right.

Now some people, including me, have had some issues getting it going. I found a solution a couple of places and have included one of them below. BTW the problem was with a Windows 7 machine. My Windows 8 machine was no trouble at all.

I hear talk that a wi-fi connection is coming but for now I am connected to my PC with a USB wire. It works pretty well and I look forward to demonstrating some of the apps I have been working on that use features that are hard to show in the emulator – like shaking. If you have a Windows Phone this app will come in handy for a lot of things.
One solution found on Reddit.
  1. Launch the app on the PC;
  2. Connect the Phone via USB;
  3. Go to Project My Screen settings on phone, it should say "Searching...";
  4. Close the app on the PC;
  5. Go to device manager on PC;
  6. Under "Universal Serial Bus Devices" you should find several instances of your phone. Right click each of them and press uninstall. It will prompt you to reboot once or twice, make sure to press "No";
  7. Disconnect the phone from USB;
  8. Launch the app on the PC;
  9. Connect the phone and wait around 30 secs for it to reinstall drivers. Note: you may need internet access for this on PC.
  10. On your phone, go to Settings->project my screen. Plug in your phone to your computer
  11. Open the Project My Screen app on your desktop/laptop. You should then receive a message on your phone asking whether you want to project your screen or not. Pressing yes will initiate the screen projection.

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