Developing on the Win phone 7 hardware without a developer account

Microsoft have released a free toolset for developing Windows Phone 7 applications. However you cannot debug or deploy onto actual hardware until you create a developer account @ $99 per year.

In my case, I only have a demo phone for 2 weeks so a developer account seems like a waste of money.

To work around this restriction, you need to do the following:

1 Unlock the phone:
Download and install the Chevron unlocker and certificate from here.

2 Stop the phone from relocking every time you reboot
Edit your hosts file (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts)
Add the line
127.0.0.1 developerservices.windowsphone.com

You can now deploy and debug on your phone.

Note: the phone will still relock itself every couple of weeks, giving the following error

“[application name] has been revoked by Microsoft. Please uninstall it.”

Just rerun Chevron and unlock again.

2nd note: You can deploy your .xap file to others and they can run them on unlocked phones. However the continual relocking may get annoying.

3rd note: You can't use Chevron to pirate applications. It will only allow you to run unsigned applications.

Developing for Windows Phone 7 in a virtual machine

According to Microsoft, installing the windows phone developer tools into a virtual machine is not supported. This is because the phone emulator is itself a virtual machine and, as Inception has shown, running a virtual machine inside a virtual machine gets really slow. The emulator also requires DirectX 10 for XNA develoment, and current virtual machines only offer DirectX9.

However I do all my development in virtual machines. I already have a VM setup with VS2010, version control, database etc. I don't fancy setting that up all over again just for a phone, particularly one that I only have for 2 weeks.

Time to do some testing...

Virtual PC
Running the dev tools in a Windows 7 Virtual PC works (or rather fails to work) as advertised. While I could create and compile a phone project, I couldn't actually run it in the emulator.

VMWare
Using a VMware vm was much better. I could compile and run a silverlight project on the emulator. On my laptop, the emulator performance was dire. On my desktop however, emulator performance was adequate but not stunning.

On either machine, XNA projects wouldn't run on the emulator due to the lack of DirectX 10. They would compile but trying to deploy would fail with "The current display adapter does not meet the emulator requirements to run XNA Framework applications."

However deploying and running on a real phone worked fine. Both Silverlight and XNA deployed and ran without any issues.

Booting from a virtual hard drive (thanks Paul)
Should work but requires Windows 7. See here.

TL;DR
You can develop Silverlight applications in a VMWare virtual machine, testing against the emulator (slow) or actual hardware (fast). You can develop XNA applications in a VMWare vm but you need to deploy to actual hardware.

Useful links
Microsoft's free tools: Create App hub
Charles Petzold giant ebook: Programming Windows Phone 7
Reddit Win Phone 7 section: http://www.reddit.com/r/wp7dev/

Windows Phone 7 - A party pack of sweets for developers

They are playing advertisements for Pascall's Party Pack on TV at the moment. The tag line is "All sweets you love, and one you can't stand." That pretty much sums up Windows Phone 7 for developers. Lots of goodness with a few things that may leave a bad taste in your mouth.

Despite the name, Windows Phone 7 Series is not a successor to Windows Mobile 6.x. Instead the name is a marketing nod towards Windows 7. Although both WP7 and WM6 are based on Windows CE, there is no resemblance at a higher level. From a user point of view, WP7 is closer to the iPhone than to WM6. A more accurate name would be Windows Phone 1.

After far too much time reading, watching and playing, here are my thoughts on WP7 as relates to development:

Tasty:

• Development is done in c# and Silverlight/XNA. While native code would be nice, C# is easier to get into than Objective C. I haven't used either Silverlight or XNA previously but they look a lot more promising than the XP era Windows Forms used by Windows Mobile.
• The tools are much better than those for the iPhone, and free
  
• Push notifications look at lot easier to do than on the iPhone
• Apparently xbox live integration is really good (I wouldn't know)
  
• There are metric shitloads of tutorials, walk throughs and documentation (Twitter apps are the new hello world)
• Games programming looks really, really nice
  

Meh:

• The tools don't work well in virtual machines. You can make it work in a Win 7 32bit VM but it will run like a dog. The tools don't work at all in Win 7 x64. If you don't want to install onto your main system, you can try booting from a virtual hard drive.
  

Yuck:

• No database support (apparently it's not necessary coz you have xml and the cloud). SQL Server CE is built into the rom, but no access is provided.
  
• No multitasking (push notifications only)
• No access to the file system. Application files all go into Isolated Storage in the app folder.
  
• No "sideloading" of applications. Apps can only be installed from the Marketplace, or by Visual Studio
• No built in file synchronisation (it's this cloud thing again).
• No Silverlight support in Windows Mobile 6.x (but there is Silverlight for Symbian wtf) and no Win forms support in WP7. I.e. even if your win mobile app was written in c# it needs to be rewritten for WP7.
  
• Limited APIs (no access to contacts, no sockets, ...)
• No native code - no c, c++, pascal etc (and thus no firefox :()
  

I haven't felt this conflicted since the vfr 1200. Some nice things balanced by some not so nice.

As mentioned, so this is essentially version 1. Some of the issues are planned to be fixed after the initial release (copy/paste, database access).

Links

Microsoft
Windows Phone 7 tools
Code samples
Developer network
Mix10 videos (check out the keynote)
UI Guide

Silverlight
Get started in Silverlight
Get started with Silverlight in WM7

Example apps
Twitter client
Another twitter client (Scott Gu)
Labyrinth
Sqlite database

Blogs
Artificial Ignorance
10rem
Mobile development