Background:
My firm has a new client who has asked us to build a Windows Phone 7.1 app. Our team wants to leverage Amazon's EC2 instances to set up our CI servers to avoid the need to have to requisition and acquire hardware for the project. We will need a Windows build agent to build the Windows Phone app.
Problem:
Setting up the Windows build agent is proving difficult. To build the Windows Phone app, we need the WP 7.1 SDK installed, however it is not supported on Windows Server and officially requires Windows Vista or Windows 7. With a workaround by Aaron Stebner I can get the SDK installed, but the Windows Phone emulator doesn't work. We can compile and run unit tests, but functional tests are not possible without the emulator.
Is it possible to enable to Windows Phone emulator to work on Windows
Server 2008 or 2008 R2?
Is it possible to create a Windows Vista or
Windows 7 instance on EC2?
You can't create Windows vista or Windows 7 on EC2. One solution will be to use Virtualbox inside an Ubuntu instance but I don't think it will work because EC2 already use an hypervisor ...
Maybe you can find an other cloud provider or buy a VPS.
Related
I want you to think creatively on this question.
I'm running Windows 10 Home edition, which as you know do not have Hyper-V and thus cannot run the Windows Phone 10 Emulator. I don't have a physical Windows 10 phone. How can I, for the minimum cost, test and preferrably debug my UWP app on a Windows Phone 10 emulator?
I tried setting up Windows 2017 Server + Visual Studio 2017 Community on an Amazon EC2 instance, and after a couple of hour of configuring I'm met with
Editing this project is not supported on a server operating system. Please use a Windows 10 client to continue development of your Universal Windows app project.
..so that was a dead end. Other suggestions?
You will have to upgrade to Windows 10 Pro (or Enterprise) to have access to Hyper-V and be able to run the Windows Phone 10 emulator (or get an actual phone device). In my opinion, upgrading your Home license to Pro will probably be the cheapest solution long term anyway.
A copy of Windows 10 Home will run $119, while Windows 10 Pro will
cost $199. For those who wish to upgrade from the Home edition to the
Pro edition, a Windows 10 Pro Pack will cost $99.
Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-prices-single-windows-10-licenses-at-119-for-home-199-for-pro/
You can NOT run a Windows Phone 10 emulator on Amazon/Azure since they use virtualized machines and they don't provide nested virtualization. You can make a Windows 10 VM on Azure for developer purposes, but you won't be able to run the phone emulator.
I connect to a Windows 8.1 Pro VM through Hyper-V running on Windows Server 2008.
It looks like in order to run the Windows 8.1 phone emulator, you need to be running Windows 8.1 Pro that is capable on running Hyper-V.
Since I am already connecting to Windows through a VM, will I not be able to enable the necessary Hyper-V features to be able to start the Windows phone emulator?
An often found solution is to run the VM inside VMWare. This allows you to enable Hyper-V inside the virtual machine. Here's a detailed step-by-step guide.
As an alternative, it appears to be possible to enable Hyper-V inside the VM using the powershell command Add-WindowsFeature -name RSAT-Hyper-V-Tools, as found on this blog.
Both of these scenario's are unsupported, but appear to work fine.
I think this is a straightforward question but I'm looking for someone who has actually tried this and can say yea/nay.
I want to run the Windows Phone 8 emulator on another Hyper-V host than the Visual Studio machine, and connect to it as a debugging device. It would be similar to connecting to a "real" phone in that it's not a local VM, but would obviously not be through a local USB connection.
Do the development tools for Windows Phone 8 support this scenario?
Do the development tools for Windows Phone 8 support this scenario?
No, this is not supported in the public SDK.
I installed Visual Studio 2012 and Windows Phone 8 SDK successfully. I created a new phone app and trying to run but it doesn't show me any emulators in Visual Studio 2012.
Make sure that your PC satisfies the system requirements for running the emulator:
Windows 8 Pro edition or greater
A processor that supports Second
Level Address Translation (SLAT)
If your computer meets the hardware and operating system requirements,
but does not meet the requirements for the Windows Phone 8 Emulator,
the Windows Phone SDK 8.0 will install and run. However, the Windows
Phone 8 Emulator will not function and you will not be able to deploy
or test apps on the Windows Phone 8 Emulator.
Source
Pretty much #Olivier's answer. Also, make sure you have Hyper-V enabled on your computer.
In lieu of this, There's a very nice tool on codeplex that pretty much checks if your computer is able to start hyper-v and the windows phone emulator.
If that passes, you'll want to follow this article in order to get hyper-v set up. Specifically the two enabling sections.
There was a post a little while back on what is required specifically here on stack overflow. It can be found here
I have got the Windows Azure Platform account.
Fot he development with Windows Azure, can I use computer with Windows XP Professional.
If not what environment should i set to start working with Windows Azure, and migrating existing web projects to Windows Azure.
Regards.
Pravin.
Since azure uses Windows Server 2008 SP2/R2 as it's core OS, you will need at least Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 to come close to mimicking the environment in Azure. If you are in a situation where you cannot upgrade your OS then you should look at utilizing a VM for development/testing purposes.
To answer your question, yes you can hack together a solution, is it pretty, no. Would I do it, no way. I also find that I like Windows 7 a lot better than XP or Vista, but I am also work for the man so I am jaded.