[Windows Phone 8] No Windows Phone 8 Device connected – Why and How to fix this?

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A lot of Windows Phone features require a real device to test (NFC, Pinch Zoom). Or, in the end, we simply need a real device to see how the app behaves.

Plug the phone into the USB port, pick Device in Visual Studio. Hit run. But:

bug

It is clearly connected. Let’s check again in Device Manager:

lumia

All normal. So what is causing this?

1. Causes

  1. Wrong date and time: the date and time on your phone is way off compared to the date and time on your computer
  2. Connections not turned on: this usually happens with a device that has not been dev unlocked yet. When unlocking, the phone has to turn on the connections it has (Wifi / 3G or both) so it can request the unlock from Microsoft’s side. If those connections are off, it can’t connect and of course can’t unlock.
  3. Running Windows 8 on a somewhat old laptop or desktop: these laptops use the Intel Chipset 6 Series, which currently has compatibility problems with Windows 8 and later. These chipsets drive the USB connections. The machines that break most often are the ones that have both a native USB 3.0 port and an older USB 2.0 port
  4. Broken USB cable: if something inside the USB cable is cut, the connection usually goes dead silent with nothing happening at all. Otherwise, the cable may be picking up interference

2. Symptoms

Everything looks normal. You can see the photo, music and video folders on the phone. You can sync, copy more files over, but you absolutely cannot deploy a XAP file to it

3. The fix

  1. Set the date and time again so it matches the computer. Your computer should have automatic time updates turned on so its time is accurate
  2. Turn the connections on
  3. Disable/Enable the faulty Intel Chipset 6 drivers. It will go back to working normally.

After doing the steps above, go into Device Manager again and uninstall the drivers related to your phone (Portable Devices and Universal Serial Bus devices). The point of this step is to remove the broken Registry Keys. Otherwise your machine will never be able to Deploy, no matter what else you try, because it will not overwrite those Registry Keys

  1. Then switch to a USB 2.0 port (to guard against the Legacy feature on USB 3.0 not working)
  2. Plug the phone in and wait for it to install the driver
  3. Try your luck again

I tried it, and it worked. How about you?