Developing Window Store Apps in Visual Studio 2013 on Window 7 64-bit without emulator

Question

This is going to be quite a long question but please bear with me till the end. Before going into the details, below are my PC environments:

• Windows 7 Professional x64
• Visual Studio Community 2013 Update 4

On top of that, I checked my PC's processor does support virtualization using Intel® Processor Identification Utility.

I also installed all the required SKD 8.1 components required to develop Windows phone 8.1 apps as shown in the picture below.

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Now I clearly understands from the visual studio website requirements:-

• Windows Phone 8.0 development requires Windows 8.1 (x64) or higher
• Windows Phone 8.1 development requires Windows 8.1 (x86) or higher
• For the Windows Phone emulators, Windows 8.1 (x64) Professional edition or higher, and a processor that supports Client Hyper-V and Second Level Address Translation (SLAT)

But from this SO Q&A it seems like developing windows 8.1 phone apps is still possible. However when I try to open an existing windows phone 8.1 project I got the error as shown in the picture below:

On top of that, in my Add New Project window there are no Windows Store Apps templates showing up.

I later found out from this msdn documentation that the RequiredPlatformVersion Element of the Visual Studio project template is filtering out the templates. However I tried to change the Blank Windows Phone project template element's value to 8 as specified in the documentation and also a few others value smaller than 6.3.0 but still fail to show the template.

Then I tried to install an extension called Windows Phone Template Pack which then adds two window phone project templates in my Add New Project window as shown below.

I created an empty project using that template and surprisingly I am able to open the windows phone 8.1 project as shown in the picture below.

That got me thinking that it should be possible to develop windows phone 8.1 apps but not emulating it but I am out of ideas on how to work around it now. I even tried looking at the denv.exe.config file to try my luck but there's nothing of interest there either.

Is there anyone that successfully build a Windows Phone 8.1 apps in an similar PC environment? A workaround will be sufficient.

Answer 1

Sorry to say this but Windows 8.1 is a requirement for developing as usually emulators on being initialized tries to load the OS into the device like the basic theme etc options.
1) You can try to connect your Windows phone to your PC and select Deploy to Device. (Though it might work and you will be able to debug yet still you would face a problem when you try to create a release build package to be uploaded on windows store. Also even though the fixes might work for short period but with Windows 10 about to be released you would be stuck with waiting for a fix to develop apps for that.)
2) You can try installing windows 8.1 inside VMWARE and deploy it.