And now for something completely unsupported.
I'm the type of person that prefers to run the latest and greatest operating system. For Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and Windows 7 I started running them while they were still betas. Unfortunately I'm in possession of a machine running Windows XP for a Silverlight project. The Windows Phone tools require Windows Vista or higher with a DirectX 10 video card, so the WP7 tools were a no-go for this machine. For various reasons I wanted the machine to be capable of opening a WP7 projects. The machine was already running Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and I have other Silverlight development components installed. So I made an attempt to get things up and running and successfully have a machine that will do WP7 development (though the emulator won't run).
Just an FYI, since I already had Visual Studio 2010 and several Silverlight development components installed I didn't need Visual Studio 2010 Express. I'm not sure how things will go for a person without VS2010 preinstalled.
I grabbed the ISO for the Windows Phone 7 tools from http://developer.windowsphone.com. After unpacking the ISO and running setup I received a message about a problem loading the setup components. I didn't expect that to work. I next started looking at the files that were in the ISO and saw the familiar "wcu" folder (Windows Component Updates). Inside of the WCU folder there were several subfolders. The only one that was important to me was the Windows Phone folder.
Installing these components individually I found that each one of them would run without any complaint or problem. I started with the Expressions Blend trial and XNA Game Studio. After installing the both of those I found that I could create (but not compile) XNA projects and run Expressions Blend for Windows Phone. I installed the other components and was then able to create and compile Windows Phone 7 projects.
When I first tried to run a Windows Phone 7 project I immediately received an error from the emulator. I changed the target device from the emulator to "Windows Phone 7 Device" and ran the project again and it successfully deployed and ran. Now that my Windows XP machine has been elevated to being cable of developing for Windows Phone 7 I'm happy. Onto better things; VMWare just released an update for VMWare Workstation that is said to improve the graphic capabilities. I've already got a virtualized WP7 dev environment in which the emulator doesn't run because of the emulated video card not meeting minimum requirements. I need to see if this update addresses that.
Tags: Windows Phone, Programming, Unsupported