Developing for WP8 with only WP7 device?

Question

I don't understand from today's WP8 event: will I be able to develop apps working on both 7.5 and 8, having only one 7.5 (7.8) device for testing?

I don't like WP emulator, even though it's better than iOS/Android ones. I know that in Visual Studio 2012 it will become even better. But still!

Answer 1

You'll have to use Windows Phone 8 emulator, or cross your fingers that the equivalent to XDA-Developers for Windows Phone roots your model of phone and is able to get Windows 8 working(hint: unlikely)

The Windows Phone 8 emulator is really very nice though. The only big troubling thing about it is that it requires hardware Hyper-V support and Windows 8. This means you can't run the phone emulator inside of most virtualization technologies. However, I've been using VMWare 9 which appears to include an "unsupported" feature to allow Hyper-V to work though.. So your only choice for running the phone emulator is to either buy VMWare 9 or upgrade a physical machine to Windows 8

Answer 2

I don't like WP emulator

But you should. The emulator for Windows Phone 8 is a full featured Hyper-V emulator, that can even run unmanaged code.

As pointed out by Matt, you'll not be able to do any deployment of Windows Phone 8 apps to your Windows Phone 7 device, and as such you'll need a new device, or use the emulator.

And as the SDK is likely to be released before any devices, I'll strongly encourage you to do development in the emulator until the real devices are on the market.

Answer 3

Current devices running Windows Phone 7.X will be able to be upgraded to Windows Phone 7.8 but not Windows Phone 8.

If you want to use a feature that is specific to WP8 you'll either have to wait for hardware or use the eumlator (when available).