How to Unlock Your WP7 Device for Development?

If you have a Windows Phone 7 device and you are a WP7Dev, you may want to develop and test your WP7 application inside your device. All the time, the simulator doesn’t help us to test our application and hence you need the hardware device. The Phone 7 by default comes as a locked for development, but if you want, you can easily unlock it for testing and debugging purpose.

In this small post, I will help you to understand each steps in detail. Continue reading to be familiar with the process.

Prerequisite

To begin with the process of unlocking your device, you must have completed the following points:

• A physical Windows Phone 7 device handy
• A Windows Live ID for AppHub account creation
• Register in the AppHub using your live ID (use Hotmail or Live account while registration, don’t use any other live IDS mapped with Yahoo, Gmail etc.)
• Pay $99 to activate your AppHub account (without valid and active AppHub account you cannot proceed)
• Install Zune software in your PC
• Connect your WP7 device to your PC via the USB cable provided with this device
• Zune should be running while doing the unlocking activity

Windows Phone Developer Activation Process

Now time is to unlock your phone for the developer access. Follow the below mentioned simple steps to activate your device for your development:

• Connect your Windows Phone 7 with your PC and unlock the phone screen if it is protected using password
• Open Zune if it is not launched after you connect your device
• Go to Start –> All programs –> Windows Phone SDK 7.1. You will notice an application named “Windows Phone Developer Registration” as shown below:
  
  
  
• Click the app to launch it. You will see the following screen in your desktop:
  
  
  
• Enter your Live ID that you used while doing the AppHub registration. Enter the same password to continue
• Click “Register” to proceed with the authentication and activation process
• Once it successfully register, it will show a message “Status: Your phone has successfully been registered” as shown in the below screenshot:
  
  
  
• The button “Register” will change to a “Unregister” button. This is to give you a flexibility to unregister your phone with the AppHub as AppHub account only supports 3 devices

Your phone is now unblocked. You can now deploy, debug or run your Windows Phone 7 application in your physical device. As a last note, I will suggest you not to use any hacks to unblock your device as this could harm and damage the hardware.