As you all surely know, and if you do not know and I tell you that I'm here, the brand new SDK for Windows Phone 8 is only possible to install it on machines with 64-bit operating systems.

What is the reason?, Well, surely there will be many, but one of them is that the new emulator to test our applications, it is not an emulator to use as we had in Windows Phone 7.5, but an image of virtualized OS through Hyper-V technology of Microsoft and this technology is only compatible with 64-bit systems as you can see in their requirements .

This to me means a great advantage over the previous emulator versions. On the one hand gives it greater stability and greater performance, on the other hand the launch multiple emulators at the same time is quite a task simpler than before, the management of images from our Windows Phone emulated now are manageable and not as before they were a single file and sometimes we had to stick with the session files that were hanged and others ...

Well, get to work and we will prepare to launch our brand new site emulator and view their full potential.

Go the first on the forehead, Visual Studio warns me kindly that you may not be enabled in the BIOS support for hardware virtualization, needed to launch Hyper-V and therefore the emulator.

But the first serious test whether our system is capable of running Hyper-V and if we have the hardware necessary for this. I remind you that we need our machines run the Hardware-assisted virtualization , SLAT (Second Level Address Translation) and DEP (hardware-based Data Execution Prevention).

If this sounds like Chinese and you have no clue what I'm talking the best is unburden this small utility from Microsoft, called Coreinfo to check all these requirements.

Just after unburden Coreinfo, execute it on the command line with administrator permissions, with the-v

  C: \> Coreinfo.exe-v 

This will display a data set of our processor capabilities.

We must ensure we have an asterisk in the last 2 features, capacity and SLAT hardware virtualization presente.y tell us that the Hypervisor is present.

Finally we need to do another test, in this case running Coreinfo without any input parameter.

  C: \> Coreinfo.exe 

Among all the features we must look gives us the option NX, which will tell us whether we have the ability to DEP (Hardware-Based Data Executivo Prevention) or not, with an asterisk.

After checking everything, we should know that we have to have an asterisk in the 3 characteristics mentioned and see Hypervisor is present, if this is not so we can start thinking about buying another computer or simply forget to try our applications in the emulator Windows Phone 8.

If we are lucky to have all these requirements, we simply go to our system BIOS and activate Hardware Virtualization is normally disabled. In my case I have just to go to the features section of the CPU in my BIOS and activate it:

Just a little something more, after checking our system and enabled in the BIOS the virtualization option, we add our user to the Administrators group Windows Hyper-V, to spare any permits and other issues when allocating hardware the emulator. To do this simply go to the station manager and assign users section of the administrators group our Hyper-V.

Well, ready, once completed these steps, the next time you run the emulator debugging, show us the notice of execution with elevated privileges if not already run Visual Studio with administrative rights.

Here our brand new emulator ready to start testing our applications for Windows Phone 8.