Windows Phone 8 Hyper-V Virtual Machine Remote Debugging

Question

I wanted to keep VS2012 Windows Phone 8 development within a Hyper-V Win8 VM. In this context I'm getting stuck with the issue of "stacked Hyper-V" - I cannot find a way to run Hyper-V Windows Phone 8 VM installed together with Windows Phone 8 SDK. (The known "trick" to use VMWare is out of scope of this topic - I wanted to keep development by solely using MS tools.)

The obvious(?) solution seems to be to setup a separate Hyper-V Windows Phone 8 VM running on a physical PC under Windows 8 Professional and to connect to that VM from within VS2012 running in a Hyper-V VM. But I cannot find Windows Phone 8 Hyper-V VM images to try to setup such a development environment nor I have a clear idea how to connect a VS2012 debugging session to such a separate Windows Phone 8 Hyper-V VM assuming I will get it somehow up & running.

Could you please advise how to solve the issues I have outlined above, namely:

• 1) download Windows Phone 8 (and Windows Phone 7.1) Hyper-V VM images;
• 2) setup separate Windows Phone 8 VM (that's should be easy I suppose if (1) available, just mentioning it here to have a complete list of the tasks/issues);
• 3) connect VS2012 Windows Phone 8 solution/project debugging session to a running Windows Phone 8 VM

?

Answer 1

It's not possible to do 3) as this is not a supported scenario with the current version of the Windows Phone 8 tools: i.e. the combination of Visual Studio and the Hyper-V emulator must be on the same host PC.

That kind of makes 1) and 2) pointless.

There's also no such thing as a Windows Phone 7.1 Hyper-V image, the WP7.1 emulator uses a different virtualisation technology which does run (slowly) from a Hyper-V VM.

It looks like you'll need to switch to VMWare or use a physical machine (with a real device if you can't run emulator due to problems with Hyper-V support).