How To: Developing Windows Phone apps without Hyper-V or Windows Pro editions

Hyper-V is the emulator used for Windows phone app development.

You'll need it if you want to develop Windows Phone v8 or later (unless you have an actual Windows phone).

Hyper-V only works with Pro editions of Windows so if you have 'standard' Win 8, or 8.1, you can't run Hyper-V (even if you're using the special Microsoft specific hardware, see here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-V#System_requirements).

So if you haven't spend the extra £200 on Win 8.1 Pro, your current Windows Phone alternative is v7.1.  It can be developed using VS2010.  This IDE doesn't need special hardware or the expensive pro editions to work and is freely available for download, for now at least, (see my previous blog).

How To: Install Visual Studio 2010 on Windows 8.1 for Windows Phone v7.1 development

To install Visual Studio Express 2010 on Win8.1, I did this (eventually!)

Download and install in this order;

• Visual C# 2010 Express from www.visualstudio.com (bottom of page)
• vcs_web.exe
• VS Express 2010 SP1 (SP=Service Pack) from www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download
• vs10sp1-kb583509.exe
• SDK7.1 from www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download
• vm_web2.exe
• SDK7.1.1 from www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download
• WPSDK-7.1.1-KB2669191-x86.exe

Some are quick to download and install, others take ages.

It took me a couple of hours.