Can I develop for Windows Phone 8 while using an Azure VM?

Question

Title says it. There are not strong enough words in the English language that can express my hatred of Windows 8. I will not install it on my personal machine.

I was hoping to create an Azure VM and do my development there. But Windows 8 was not an option for a VM. So on a whim I created a 2012 Server VM and downloaded and installed the Windows 8 SDK. It installed fine.

I created a Hello World application and tried to run it. I got an error saying that Hyper-V was required. I used Coreinfo.exe to check and it says Hyper-V is not supported. So am I SOL?

Answer 1

The Windows Phone 8 emulator requires Client Hyper-V, which is a new feature of Windows 8. The emulator is an x86 virtual machine, which runs an x86 build of Windows Phone 8, and makes use of the RemoteFX technology for hardware virtual GPU support. It's so it runs at a high percentage of real device performance, and is very closely compatible.

Unfortunately, for hardware reasons, Hyper-V cannot be nested. In the Intel and AMD processor virtualization models, a guest operating system cannot itself be a nested hypervisor.

RemoteFX requires Second Level Address Translation. How to check if your processor supports it.

If you want to use the emulator, I'm afraid you have to install Windows 8. You can always dual-boot. Alternatively, get a phone developer-unlocked so you can debug on real hardware.