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).