Windows Phone 8 SDK what a Big Time Flop
So this evening I
had the pleasure of installing the Windows 8 Phone SDK, and 1/2 an hour later
uninstalling it. Microsoft has made my
life easier by making me run the Windows 8 Phone SDK on Windows 8 and also
requiring Hyper-V to be able to run.
I have my instances
of Windows 8 running in Parallels and VMWare which don't support running
Hyper-V. At least not now, and I don't
care if they ever do. I should not have
to run Hyper-V in order to run a simple emulator. What clown came up with that brilliant idea?
A machine running Windows 8 with SLAT enabled is required to be able to run these emulators.
A machine running Windows 8 with SLAT enabled is required to be able to run these emulators.
Well, at least I
don't have to worry about build a Windows 8 Phone client for the app I am
building. Man Microsoft has become such
an unorganized mess it is almost unbelievable.
Back to Xcode...
UPDATE:
This is what I got back from Parallels.
Time to move to VMWare Fusion
On VMWare site:
CAUTION: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO RUN HYPER-V ON A VIRTUAL MACHINE IN PRODUCTION.
UPDATE 2:
I asked Parallels if there are any plans to support this. They responded with:
Update 3
I now have the Phone SDK running in VMware's unsupported environment. I still think is was a bad architectural decision to make Hyper-V a requirement. Some companies don't want Windows 8 on their desktops but do want us to develop Windows 8 Phone and Tablet apps.
Update 4:
Read this post on SLAT.
UPDATE:
This is what I got back from Parallels.
I am sorry to inform you Tad. As of now Hyper v is not
supported by Parallels. May be in upcoming version Hyper V will be supported by
Parallels Desktop application.
Time to move to VMWare Fusion
On VMWare site:
Hyper-V
Hyper-V has been added to the Workstation 9 guest operating system list. This enables customers to run Windows 8 with Hyper-V enabled, or install Hyper-V Server. This can be used for educational purposes or for building prototype Hybrid Clouds. This feature is NOT SUPPORTED and probably never will be. Microsoft does not support nesting of their hypervisor which makes it extremely difficult - if not impossible for VMware to fix issues that may occur in this configuration. For this reason, this capability has been implemented purely to see if we could do it!CAUTION: DO NOT ATTEMPT TO RUN HYPER-V ON A VIRTUAL MACHINE IN PRODUCTION.
UPDATE 2:
I asked Parallels if there are any plans to support this. They responded with:
With respect to your previous correspondence I would like
to let you know that as of now we do not have any ETA to get Hyper V feature
implemented on Parallels Virtual Machine. However we would suggest you to keep
update with our upcoming builds and version of Parallels you will come to know
once this feature gets implemented.
My Thoughts:
I
personally do not think Parallels is lacking, I thing Microsoft architected a
stupid solution for running a simple emulator. Though the sad truth is, we have
no choice but to develop in their new sadly architected environment, so we need
the feature.
Update 3
I now have the Phone SDK running in VMware's unsupported environment. I still think is was a bad architectural decision to make Hyper-V a requirement. Some companies don't want Windows 8 on their desktops but do want us to develop Windows 8 Phone and Tablet apps.
Update 4:
Read this post on SLAT.
posted by tadanderson at 5:29 PM
9 Comments:
Are you using VMware Fusion 5? It has Hyper-V support.
"... a simple emulator"
But that's the whole point.
The iOS simulator which only "simulates" a small fraction of iOS devices' capabilities and features.
The WindowsPhone EMULATOR actually EMULATES the phone hardware and runs a real phone OS image inside the emulator.
This allows the WP emulator to emulate almost every feature of WP7 and WP8 devices including accelerometer, location, orientation, etc.
But that's the whole point:
An EMULATOR emulates the characteristics of the phone device itself ... so well in fact that the emulator runs an actual device image, closely emulating most of the features and capabilities of the phone & OS.
Simulators like those offered by iOS do a pretty poor job of simulating a phone's capabilities.
While, yes, this means that the WP8 SDK needs to be run on a physical machine, you COULD convert your VM's HDD to a VHD and boot to the VHD when you need to do WP dev work.
In case you haven't noticed the entire desktop section of Windows 8 is a VM ...so u want to run a VM inside a VM inside a VM ?..how many recursive VM's do you want to have running before ur machine's processor starts grinding to a halt.
@ Jojo- Exactly. I don't want VMs inside of VMs inside of VMs. That is the issue. MS is forcing this with their new emulator architecture.
@ Sandy - I will be if Parallels does not catch up soon. I still think it was a bad move by MS.
@BitCrazed - Your lost
The reason for using Hyper-V is NOT to simulate or emulate, but to run actual production OS code (albeit compiled for x86, not ARM) at full native speed directly on the processor. You'll note that hardware virtualization support on your processor, with Second Level Address Translation (Intel: Extended Page Tables, AMD: Nested Page Tables), is also required. This is a requirement of RemoteFX, which virtualizes your graphics chip and allows the Windows Phone VM to do hardware-accelerated graphics.
Unfortunately, the hardware virtualization support does not nest. Only one hypervisor can make use of it - you can't use a hypervisor from within a VM. You have to actually boot Windows 8, e.g. install another partition or boot from VHD.
@Mike- " to run actual production OS code" < < I don't need or want that because I will only use it to test functionality, not performance. I will use an actual phone when I want to test it on hardware.
I do all my Windows Phone Development running windows 8 on my MacBook using VMWare Fusion.
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