Develop Windows Phone 7 on Windows XP

Question

Dear all,

I downloaded the Windows Phone 7 SDK yesterday but when I installed it on my Windows XP it complaint that it needs to be installed on Windows 7. My question is, is it possible to install the Windows Phone 7 SDK or develop for Windows Phone 7 on WinXP? Is there any workaround that has been made to overcome this?

Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

System Requirements

• Supported Operating Systems: Windows 7; Windows Vista
  • Windows® Vista® (x86 and x64) ENU with Service Pack 2 – all editions except Starter Edition
  • Windows 7 (x86 and x64) ENU – all editions except Starter Edition
    
• Installation requires 3 GB of free disk space on the system drive.
• 2 GB RAM
• DirectX 10 capable graphics card with a WDDM 1.1 driver

No, I don't see XP in that list. Clearly it is being verified by the installer, you simply won't get it installed.

Answer 2

Hi Jpartogi,

A workaround to the install constraint has been explored in a few posts over at msdn wp7 answers forum. There has been no definitive confirmation of ways around this or reasons confirmed why the restriction exists (though an xna requirement has been noted in the linked thread).

One such post you can check out is here.

I'd like to be able to workaround this myself even if the capability was limited just so I can do some testing across multiple pc's some of which still run xp.

Edit: There is an update on this thread which might be worth trying.

Answer 3

I've opened a topic on MSDN forums asking the same thing: Windows Phone 7 CTP Windows XP bypass?

Long story short, even if you figure a way out to install Windows Phone 7 CTP tools on Windows XP, you will not be able to launch Phone Emulator. It just crashes on runtime.