Windows Phone 8 on Win 7

So, short story is...

My company isn't ready to move to Windows 8, but we want to develop for Windows Phone.

wut do?

Get a Windows Phone 8 device and use that to debug on instead of the emulator?

Um. I'm kinda looking for a different answer, or am I to believe that Microsoft is taking the "do it our way" approach? I'm not knocking it, just seems a little outlandish that there's no shim until adoption rate of Windows 8 goes higher.

If you needed Vista to develop for Windows Phone not one company would have written anything.

Create a Win8 virtual machine and develop on that?  Might be a little painful at times, but I did this to play with Win8 development before Win8 went RTM (might be OK if you have a beefy machine to run the VM on).

Herbie

There's nothing wrong in using the phone as a dedicated debug device, at least you get real-life performance since the Windows Phone 8 emulator might give you the false idea that your program is running fast enough (that's right, the 8 emulator is running too fast on my machine since it's running in hypervisor mode in stark contrast of the 7 emulator).

Sad that your company isn't willing to make an exception for sake of business development.

edit: besides, at this point I wouldn't develop a dedicated Windows Phone app but one using Portable Library, so you can have the app run on WP7, WP8 and W8 with maximum code sharing.

17 minutes ago, Dr Herbie wrote

Create a Win8 virtual machine and develop on that?  Might be a little painful at times, but I did this to play with Win8 development before Win8 went RTM (might be OK if you have a beefy machine to run the VM on).

Herbie

This won't work because the Windows Phone Emulator is itself a Hyper-V virtual machine.

Cybermagell​an: Your only option is to have a Windows 8 Pro desktop system.  If your company's IT department refuses to give you such a machine in order to fulfill the company's business requirements of developing a Windows Phone 8 app, then you need to escalate that up the management chain.  IT doesn't get to decide whether you can do your job or not.

I was not ready to switch to Windows 8 from Windows 7 but I wanted to do WP 8 development. What I found was that even though I had a physical WP8 device and therefore didn't care about the emulator, the problem is that the WP8 tools won't install in Windows 7. You have to use Windows 8.

Now my particular hardware doesn't support the emulator so even after I upgraded to Windows 8 and installed the WP8 tools, I could not use the emulator. Works fine with an physical WP8 device.

So it has less to do with the emulator and more to do with MS simply forcing us to use Windows 8. I say forcing because there are hacks out there to get the WP8 tools successfully installed on Windows 7 (minus emulator). Those hacks essentially tricks the installer into thinking it is Windows 8 and therefore not exiting out early.

EDIT: What I am saying is that the only valid technical reason to limit WP8 development to Windows 8 is because the emulator won't work in Windows 7. However since the emulator is an optional component even in Windows 8, this shows MS is artificially limiting WP8 development to Windows 8.

2 hours ago, BitFlipper wrote

I was not ready to switch to Windows 8 from Windows 7 but I wanted to do WP 8 development. What I found was that even though I had a physical WP8 device and therefore didn't care about the emulator, the problem is that the WP8 tools won't install in Windows 7. You have to use Windows 8.

Now my particular hardware doesn't support the emulator so even after I upgraded to Windows 8 and installed the WP8 tools, I could not use the emulator. Works fine with an physical WP8 device.

So it has less to do with the emulator and more to do with MS simply forcing us to use Windows 8. I say forcing because there are hacks out there to get the WP8 tools successfully installed on Windows 7 (minus emulator). Those hacks essentially tricks the installer into thinking it is Windows 8 and therefore not exiting out early.

EDIT: What I am saying is that the only valid technical reason to limit WP8 development to Windows 8 is because the emulator won't work in Windows 7. However since the emulator is an optional component even in Windows 8, this shows MS is artificially limiting WP8 development to Windows 8.

sounds like more of the same stuff they have done to us before...

I have to keep a copy of VS 2008 ready so I can update and support two projects.

if the smart device tools from VS 2008 installed into VS 2010 then I would not need to have VS 2008 on my dev machine.

does VS 2012 support development for Windows Phone 7 ?  

or must you have VS 2010 for phone 7 and VS 2012 for phone 8 ?

Remeber that WP8 is the same OS as Windows 8, where WP7 was not an OS.

I think there may be issues when they issue updates, so testing Win 7 may increase the time it takes to ship updates.

@vesuvius: That doesn't sound quite right. W8 & WP8 share the same kernel; beyond that the usermode stuff is different me thinks. WP7 was based on the WinCE kernel with its own usermode stuff.

Bottom line: kernel != OS.

What I don't understand is, Win8 is Win7 plus a fancy environment that cannot run VS. So, I don't see why the crappy OS support.

So it has less to do with the emulator and more to do with MS simply forcing us to use Windows 8.

They want people to use the emulator because Windows Phone applications are expected to run on devices with multiple resolutions, and you are expected to test all of them.  Your physical device has just one.

Not having the emulator is going to limit your ability to be successful in developing an app.  Why would Microsoft support this approach?

1 hour ago, magicalclick wrote

What I don't understand is, Win8 is Win7 plus a fancy environment that cannot run VS. So, I don't see why the crappy OS support.

Because Windows 8 ships with Hyper-V 3.0, which relies on support in the OS for second-level address translation (SLAT).  Without this, graphical performance inside the virtual machine is really hampered, and virtual machines require significantly more memory to run since they can't cooperate with the host operating system to dynamically allocate and deallocate memory as needed by the VM.

Keep in mind that a Windows Phone 8 device is going to have something like a dual-core 1.5ghz ARM processor.  That's ARM, not Intel x64 like the host OS.  The virtual machine environment has to be as fast as possible to deliver the kind of perf needed to consistently run at full speed.  This requires cooperation from the host operating system.  Windows 8 was designed for this.  Windows 7 is not.

@magicalclick: Win8 is just Win7 with a different UI, Win7 is just Vista with a different UI, Vista is just XP with a different UI, XP is just 2000 with a fisher price UI, 2000 is just 98 with a different UI, 98 is just 95 with an updated UI, 95 is just 3.1 without as much DOS.

You think I'm joking, but I've heard that argument of "Version X is just the same as Version X-1 with a different UI, it's not like anything is actually different" about every version of Windows that I've ever used.

@kettch: no, obviously no, because Vista runs on a new driver model which caused a lot of driver issues. And win7 used the same driver model after OEM was able to address all the issues during Vista time. I have yet to hear them doing such major change that would affect graphics or the environment that runs VS. even if the emulation is slow, as warren suggested, it is still useable, not like black screen or dead pixels or random color popping out.

5 hours ago, warren wrote

*snip*

They want people to use the emulator because Windows Phone applications are expected to run on devices with multiple resolutions, and you are expected to test all of them.  Your physical device has just one.

Not having the emulator is going to limit your ability to be successful in developing an app.  Why would Microsoft support this approach?

Then why was it OK to install the WP8 tools on my Windows 8 machine after the installer warned me that the hardware doesn't support SLAT and therefore the emulator won't work? Your logic doesn't hold based on this.

It is merely MS placing artificial restrictions in hope to force W8 adoption.

1 hour ago, BitFlipper wrote

*snip*

It is merely MS placing artificial restrictions in hope to force W8 adoption.

Even if that's the case...... so what?  Windows 8 is significantly better than Windows 7 as an operating system, even if you leave Metro out of the discussion.  Why are you scared of new software all of a sudden?

6 hours ago, BitFlipper wrote

*snip*

It is merely MS placing artificial restrictions in hope to force W8 adoption.

As if developers are a huge percentage of all PC users

Application development can be divided in two groups:

• Those that develop for a platform because there is a large potential customer crowd
• Those that develop applications on a platform because it provides the best support for creating it in an efficient, reliable and cost effective way and customers that willing to buy these applications including the OS stack.

In my opinion the second one is a bit more risky, but if you have a great app that's the best in the crowd, people are even willing to change OS in order for it to run.

My 2 cts.