Windows Phone 7 Installation User Errors with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate RC
Before you begin:
So, you want to develop applications for Windows Phone 7. You have access to the public Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Release Candidate and would rather use that because Express feels to wimpy. You should know that before you travel down this rabbit hole, you will have copies of both Ultimate and Express on your computer by the time you are done installing.
You will need to install in this order:
- Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate RC ISO
- Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP (Installer | Release Notes)
- Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010
I put the individual links to the setup and release notes for a reason: you'll really need both. Before you start anything, I suggest reading the Installation category numbers 1-4. You may not be able to install it at all so you might as well know up front. If you run as a normal user for development (and you should), #6 is very important. Considering the alternative is always running VS 2010 as an administrator, this is a better option.
After the beasts overtake your hard drive (post installation):
The uninstallation category itself is pretty tame but uninstalling any portion of the Developer Tools CTP that it will have to install it again before you can remove the entire thing, or in my case reinstall it because I erroneously installed Express before Ultimate. This is a small issue to keep everything as one cohesive unit because I remember the XNA uninstall experience to be more difficult.
If you happen to run Visual Studio and open a project without installing the Silverlight 4 Tools first you will be prompted by a MessageBox with a link to download. Since I had to copy/paste/paste the URL into a web browser, I figured I would save someone else the trouble and point out the necessity of having it installed. This was the very reason that sparked the post in the first place because it seemed too big not to be mentioned anywhere in my Google searches.
Taming the beasts (development):
While developing, I would also suggest paying close attention to the entire Silverlight Application Development heading. #5 outlines specific parts of Ultimate that will not function, like Testing. Most of these quirks are because this is a very early CTP build. The beta and release candidates should have a lot of the known issues worked out.
Update: In doing research on the expiration dates I realized that Ultimate RC expires on June 30th, 2010. Considering the CTP will only run on the RC bits, this poses a bit of a problem. The version of Express that is installed expires on May 13, 2011 so the likely course of action is to just use that after June 30th or when you switch to RTM. You can find out how many days each SKU has by going to Help/About. Thanks to Caspar Kleijne and Diego Ponciano for pointing me in the right direction via Twitter.
April 7th, 2010 - 15:40
Maybe its me –again– but none of this, zero, nada, zip not one of the recent VS2010 or WP7 betas or RC distros will install using Virtual PC 2007 on an XP Pro machine nor on a Vista machine.
April 10th, 2010 - 01:57
Which Guest OS are you using inside Virtual PC 2007? VS 2010 *should* support XP SP3 according to the download notes in the link above. Are you allocating enough RAM? I know that’s a simple question but I’m grasping at straws without knowing specifics.
The Windows Phone CTP via this link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=2338b5d1-79d8-46af-b828-380b0f854203&displaylang=en does *not*. It is only supported on Vista+ era operating systems. I assume it flat out will not install and give some “This is XP. You soooooo stupaaahd!” message if you try. Again, Visual Studio shouldn’t have this problem but I haven’t exactly tried running it in XP Mode since I’m on Windows 7.
In the past MS provided VPC images of bigger products like this where the OS and the product were only good until they expired. I never actually used these versions to know how they worked but more than one person wondered why they didn’t go this route again. It would’ve made things a lot simpler.
Are you getting any error messages? There should be log files in your temp folder that explain whats happening provided you can decypher them. They tend to be too verbose for me to fully understand but I can at least make out what is roughly breaking or it might give me a good string to pop into Google for more information.
Sorry I couldn’t be of more help.