Windows XP is not supported for Windows phone 7 development tools

Question

It is unfortunate that Windows XP is not supported for installing windows phone 7 Series development tools wile VS 2010 RC works fine. I only have a work laptop with Win XP.

Is there any plan to support Win XP in near future?

Answer 1

This can only be a good move imo, what Microsoft have to avoid is die hards sticking to XP forcing them to have to constantly support it. It really is time to upgrade. Sorry for the somewhat rant but you can't expect Microsoft to support and develop and 9+ year old OS.

Answer 2

Mainstream support of XP was terminated on 14 April 2009. I think it is safe to say XP has no future. So I wouldn't expect to see much support for forthcoming products.

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Joel Ivory Johnson | http://www.j2i.net

It takes all the running you can do to stay in one place.If you want to get somewhere else,you must try to run at least twice as fast as that.

Answer 3

It's an interesting move... even when the RC of VS2010 supports WinXP SP3.
I'm assuming it's a limitation with Silverlight 4....

Answer 4

WinXP needs to go the way of IE6 IMHO.

Answer 5

While not my OS of choice at work I use a Windows XP machine and we are working on a Silverlight 4 application.  Silverlight 4 works fine on  XP. It's just the Windows Phone developer tools that don't.

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Joel Ivory Johnson | http://www.j2i.net

It takes all the running you can do to stay in one place.If you want to get somewhere else,you must try to run at least twice as fast as that.

Answer 6

I agree :-)

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Joel Ivory Johnson | http://www.j2i.net

It takes all the running you can do to stay in one place.If you want to get somewhere else,you must try to run at least twice as fast as that.

Answer 7

Hello Satish,

To confirm information offered by other replies, there are no plans to provide support for the tools in Windows XP.  I do not know the specific limitations, but as the mainstream support for Windows XP has ended, support for the OS is not a priority for the team creating the tools.

Thank you for your interest!

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Dan Reagan | Microsoft | Windows Phone 7 Series Support

Answer 8

once again cross eyed logic. Why support Vista? (when XP is available)...

Why does RC 2010 work on XP?

Why? You can say "user experience" 30 times a minute all you want.

It's to sell Windows 7.

 

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Will work for gourmet food...

Answer 9

once again cross eyed logic. Why support Vista? (when XP is available)...

Why does RC 2010 work on XP?

Why? You can say "user experience" 30 times a minute all you want.

It's to sell Windows 7.

 

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Will work for gourmet food...

The availability of new operating systems and user experience doesn't seem to be a factor. Microsoft has a predefined life time for all the Windows products and many of their other products. The lifetime is published and if you'd like to see it you can find it here: http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=11707 .

As is the habit once a product is no longer within Mainstream Support Microsoft starts to put less of an emphasis on supporting it (as opposed to marking the product for complete incompatibility all together). Like Dan said, XP is no longer a priority. 

And Visual Studio 2010 RC does work on XP. I've got it installed on a work machine running XP. It is specifically the Windows 7 tools that do not.

 

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Joel Ivory Johnson | http://www.j2i.net

It takes all the running you can do to stay in one place.If you want to get somewhere else,you must try to run at least twice as fast as that.

Answer 10

Just because it does not have  a "7" in the name....you and I know it can and should work.

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Will work for gourmet food...

Answer 11

One factor is choosing not to support XP could the the lack of modern video support. IE9 won't run on XP either.

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Ginny Caughey
Device Application Development MVP

 

Answer 12

Just because it does not have  a "7" in the name....you and I know it can and should work.

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I'm qualifying that this is not my view. I do not think that it can and should work on XP. From XP to Vista there are a number of huge arcitectural changes in the Windows operating system that affect support for virtual machines, video acceleration, and more.

One factor is choosing not to support XP could the the lack of modern video support. IE9 won't run on XP either.

Some of the latest DirectX APIs don't run on XP, the Azure tools also won't run on Windows XP, and several other APIs and tools released over the past couple of years don't run on XP.

I thought about looking into the emulator executable to see what OS DLLs it was using. The fact that the emulator included in the phone tools is based off of an x86 processor makes me think that the emulator is aking advantage of some of the virtualization features that came with Vista. I didn't get very far in looking into this though. The information wouldn't change anything so beyond satisfying a curiousity I couldn't see any advantage or value from it, so I've decided to leave it alone.

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Joel Ivory Johnson | http://www.j2i.net

It takes all the running you can do to stay in one place.If you want to get somewhere else,you must try to run at least twice as fast as that.

Answer 13

Yes the phone emulator runs slow without enabling virtualisation technolgy. This has already been reported on this site. I'm not saying that is the sole/main reason they have left out XP support but if VT is only in vista/7 then it is another reason for them to not bother with XP... a dev suite with a slow slow emulator wouldn't be much use to anyone (especially until we have real hardware we could test on).

 

 

Answer 14

Although I understand why Microsoft would choose not to support Windows Phone Dev Tools on WinXP, the only reason I wish it would is so that I can install it in Windows XP Mode on my Windows 7 machine.

I do not want to install a CTP on my clean everyday Windows 7 machine.  I only want CTP's in some sort of virtual machine, something I can quickly and easily remove once it's released (and not have to worry about the inevitable leftover's of CTP's.)

So, I wish that the Windows Phone Developer Tools worked Windows XP [Mode], OR a VM of Vista or Windows 7 came with Windows 7.  Either way doesn't matter to me.

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/* joshua m */

Answer 15

Workaround for installing Windows Phone 7 CTP on Windows XP:

1. Download the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh
2. Extract the contents of the setup package by running vm_web.exe /x and choosing a path to extract to
3. Go to the folder you extracted to in step 2 and open the file baseline.dat in notepad
4. Look for the section named [gencomp7788]
5. Change the value InstallOnLHS from 1 to 0
6. Change the value InstallOnWinXP from 1 to 0
7. Save and close baseline.dat
8. Run setup.exe /web from the folder you extracted to in step 2

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Silverlight Novice