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If you do some Google searches on developing Windows Phone 7 applications in a virtual machine you will see that you can do it. I even found a post someone suggesting that it will work fine if you use VMware Fusion on a Mac. His last comment being "If you want to do Windows Phone 7 Development in a virtual machine, you might need to get a Mac.  I love mine!".

The truth be told, you don't really need a Mac to develop your Windows Phone 7 applications in a virtual machine. You need VMware Workstation 7 for Windows and yes, you can use VMware Fusion for the Mac, and I would assume it would work with the Linux version but I've not tried that yet.



There is a catch to all this. VMware will work if you are building a Windows Phone 7 Silvelight application. However, if you are building XNA applications the emulator will give you an error about not having the right video card. The reason for that is that the virtual machine cannot emulate DirectX10 which is required for XNA games in the Windows Phone 7.

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I downloaded the XNA 4/Windows Phone 7 tools and started playing around with it. I built a quick Silverlight Twitter reader for the phone in about 15 minutes. Everything worked fine with that.

Then I decided to build an XNA "something" for the phone. When I tried to deploy it to the emulator, I don't have a phone yet, I got the message "Zune software is not launched error...". My initial thought, of course, was that it was trying to deploy to the device. When I try to change the deployment option by changing the drop down next to the "Start Debug" button it was grayed out. Hmmm... what to do? I cranked open a Windows 7 VM where I don't have installed the Zune software. I created an XNA project and when I tried to run it the emulator came up (see this post for more details). But the option to change the start up was still grayed out.



After much looking around in Google, where all...

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