Creating a Virtual Windows Phone 8 Development Environment

Introduction

Like me, many developers didn't want to switch Operating Systems to develop for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 (WP8). After following the instructions in this tip, if you are one of these developers, you will be able to start developing for WP8 while keeping whatever Operating System you currently have.

Requirements

In plain English, your computer just needs two things. First, your computer must have Hyper-V or any virtual machine you try to setup will not work, also your Windows phone emulator will not function even if you were just setting up Windows 8 without doing it in a VM. The second requirement is that you must have a 64 bit computer. There may be other things you need, but for the most part, if you didn't have these, you would be dead in the water.

Gather the Following

The following items will be needed to start setting up this development environment:

• VMware Player [Downloads]
• Windows 8 x64 Image [Download]
• Visual Studio x64 2012 (Can be express) [Download]
• Windows Phone 8 SDK [Download]

Setting Up the Environment

Step 1: Start by installing your VMware Player.

Step 2: Once that is setup, locate your Windows 8 x64 Image (.iso). With your VMware player, create a Virtual Machine with that Windows 8 Image.

Step 3: In Notepad, open C:\Users\{YOUR USERNAME}\Documents\Virtual Machines\{VM NAME}\{VM NAME}.vmx.

Once that file is opened, append the following items:

hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = "FALSE" 
mce.enable = "TRUE" 

 Note:  These options that you provide tell your VMware configuration not to report to the Hyper-V that it's running in a virtual machine. Hyper-V checks if it's running in a virtual machine, and after this check if it is running in a virtual machine Hyper-V will not work. Since the emulator uses Hyper-V it would not work without these options configured.   

Step 4: Install Visual Studio 2012.

Step 5: Install the Windows Phone 8 SDK. 

Since we did Step 3, we should be able to run this development environment as a virtual machine in VMware.

Conclusion

This installation is pretty straight forward as long as you remember to do Step 3.
I didn't pollute the tutorial with too many details since I have a technical audience here, and as a result made it more straight forward.