Can’t Render Card – Bot Framework Emulator

I was having a strange problem with rendering Adaptive Cards today, the emulator just kept complaining that it couldn’t render the card. I’m using the latest Adaptive Card package (1.1) so I couldn’t see why they’d be a problem. Turns out the emulator currently only supports 1.0. So when you create a card you have to do something like;

AdaptiveCard var = new AdaptiveCard(new AdaptiveSchemaVersion(1, 0));

The Windows Phone Emulator wasn’t able to connect to the Windows Phone operating system

Today I fired up Visual Studio to create a Windows Phone application, just like I had done the past couple of days, only to be faced with;

[Window Title]
Windows Phone Emulator

[Content]
The Windows Phone Emulator wasn’t able to connect to the Windows Phone operating system:

The emulator couldn’t determine the host IP address, which is used to communicate with the guest virtual machine.

Some functionality may be disabled.

[Close]

Hmm, what the **? I had a look around the internet and saw some horrible posts about re-installing the SDK. Ergh. One post mentioned an internal developer who had to uninstall VPNs, and remove all the virtual switches. None of which filled me with joy. So I opened Hyper-V manager and looked at the virtual switch settings for the phone emulator. I nodded sagely, then removed it – hoping the emulator would spot it was missing the settings and recreate them. It worked, the emulator recreated the settings and worked. Hurray! Hopefully it won’t happen too often…strange.