I was trying to install Windows Phone 8 SDK on my Windows 7 machine and it hit me with the ‘supported only on Windows 8’ message. I actually wanted to develop Phone 7.5 apps on Visual Studio 2012, impossible thing with the 7.1 SDK, so I thought 8 SDK will do the job.
As if it was not enough that the 8 SDK was controversial upon release, now that it’s generally available, to me it seems like a horrible decision to make it available only for Windows 8, because in my humble opinion, no serious and sane developer will install Windows 8 ever, or at least in the near future, just because of the Metro UI.
So, anyone knows any workarounds for developing Windows Phone 8 on Windows 7, or at least develop for 7.5 but using Visual Studio 2012?
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Nope, it’s all Windows 8 unfortunately. A reason is the hypervisor in Windows 8 is used to emulate or virtualise Windows phone 8 machines. That and marketing of course.
Edit:
AS for developers using Windows 8, I use it on all my laptops now and like it. I run Visual Studio 2010 and 2012 under it with no issues.
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(Your have probably already found a solution for your problem, but i think this might be useful to other that, as me, are setting their environment for the first time.)
Windows Phone 8 SDK includes Visual Studio 2012 Express.
If you install it on a virtual machine, like explained in this Nokia Developer Wiki article, you should be able to continue using your Windows 7 machine and avoid moving to Windows 8, while having a working WP8 Emulator.
The biggest reason being that windows 8 apps and WP8 apps use the new WinRT runtime don’t support .NET, you can’t run winRT on Windows 7 so your apps won’t compile. You could create metro style apps with WPF, but they won’t run on Windows 8 (at least not in metro/modern mode).
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