Setup Windows Phone 8 Dev environment in virtual machine

Windows Phone SDK 8.0 enables us to develop Windows Phone 8 mobile applications. There are two key requirements for installing Windows Phone SDK 8.0:

• Hardware-assisted virtualization (make sure it is enabled in BIOS)
• 64-bit version of Windows 8 Pro edition or higher

Here are the steps:

1. Install Windows 8 X64 in VMWare Workstation. Make sure that in the Virtual Machine settings under the section Virtualizaion engine the option 'Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI' is enabled.

2. Power on the virtual machine, in Windows Features enable the Hyper-V components.

However you may find that the Hyper-V Platform feature is disabled. In order to enable it, which is essential for Windows Phone 8 development, we need to do a small configuration change.

3. Power off the virtual machine. Go to the virtual machine folder, open the *.vmx file by using notepad.

Add the line below and save.

hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = "FALSE"

4. Power on the virtual machine, go to the Windows Features and you will find the feature is enabled now. Tick all the features under Hyper-V then click OK.

5. Install Visual Studio 2012 and its latest updates.

6. Install Windows Phone SDK 8.0 and its latest updates. During the installation you may get an error message. 

The trick to solve this weird problem is changing the system date to 1st October, 2013.

7. After the installations complete, fire up Visual Studio 2012 and create a Windows Phone 8 project.

8. Choose one of the emulators then press F5.

9. The application is launched in the emulator, which means the development environment is ready to go.