Since a few days I’m running a mac computer for my work. Why? Because I do a lot of mobile development. I started out with Android phone development, but now I’m expanding my skillset more and more into the iOS/Mac world. This requires apple hardware, so I got a mac computer to work on.
A mac is a great piece of compution hardware, however it also provides me with new challenges. I am after all a .NET developer. .NET doesn’t really run on Mac, except with Mono. There’s no Visual Studio on Mac and there’s no Windows Phone 8 emulator on Mac.
The only alternative you have for running Visual Studio and tools like that, is installing Windows on a VMware or parallels virtual machine. A great solution, since modern Mac computers have a lot of processing power on board. My Macbook runs a Core i7 2.7Ghz with a boatload of memory, so it shouldn’t be much of a problem.
So far so good you might guess. Just run Windows inside a VM with Visual Studio and you’re good to go for Windows Phone development. I would be if I was still running VS2010 with Windows Phone 7. The new Windows Phone 8 SDK requires some very specific hardware. It runs inside a hyper-v image. Which means it’s essentially a virtualized piece of hardware.
Running a virtualized piece of hardware inside a virtualized piece of hardware. Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? In this blogpost I will explain how you can run the Windows Phone 8 emulator on a VMWare virtual machine.
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