Bad news for all us developers who use virtual machines to develop Windows software. The new WP8 emulator is a Hyper-V machine and will only run on non virtualised hosts. So my Mac OSX Parallels 8 dev setup with Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 installed in a virtual machine will allow me to install the Windows Phone 8 SDK and all the tools but the phone emulator will not start. As far as I can see there is no way around this…
I can still develop using my virtual machine I just cannot run the emulator. It would probably work if I had a physical WP8 phone connected to the Mac host but right now I don’t have a WP8 phone. The only solution for me now is to go the BootCamp route and partition of a whole chunk of disk space for a Windows Phone 8 development environment.
Update 2012-11-01: The Bootcamp alternative turned out to be a dead end on my machine. 🙁
Thanks a lot for posting about this crazy issue.
As I did’t find a post for this topic in Paralles forum I added one:
http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?p=646448#post646448
Next Monday I will get a Lumia 920, will let you know if that works for testing.
For Windows 8 Dev., connecting to real devices running the “Remote Debugger” works fine via Parallels.
Reply on Parallels forum:
The emulator is actually a virtual machine, so we are talking about a vm inside a vm, this requires support for nested Hyper-V, which afaik is planned but not implemented yet, also VMWare Fusion already supports this, if you are so desperate.
————-
http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?p=646448#post646448
In the one that wrote this reply on the Parallels forums, I edited it and added some information:
“The emulator is actually a virtual machine, so we are talking about a vm inside a vm, this requires support for nested Hyper-V, which afaik is planned but not implemented yet although Windows doesn’t actually support its Hyper-V being nested, also VMWare Fusion already supports this exprimentally, if you are so desperate, but don’t count too much on this feature because, as I said, Windows doesn’t support this well.”
But there was already a thread about this that has much more detail:
http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=264780
Thanks for leaving a comment – it sure is crazy. More and more developers are working in a virtualized environment and Parallels needs to support it by exposing the hardware features since it seems possible. But Microsoft have really messed up by not supporting virtual development environments for Windows Phone. Cross device/OS development is more or less a requirement for mobile app developers and that usually means virtual machines are required…
Btw, I can confirm that you can Dev with a real wp8 phone from a Mac Pro and rMBP using parallels 8.
my quick guide that describes how to install and run windows 8 with VS12 and phone emulator on VMware player: http://goo.gl/MqgT8
Actually you can do some settings to run emulator in the VM, please refer to http://blogs.msdn.com/b/interoperability/archive/2012/12/21/how-to-develop-for-windows-phone-8-on-your-mac.aspx