Installing Windows Phone 7 SDK

So I pretty much hate Windows, but I was curious about Windows Phone 7's SDK environment. So I had a go at setting up a dev environment. First the SDK requirements are quite high.

Supported operating systems: Windows 7, Windows Vista

• Windows® Vista® (x86 and x64) with Service Pack 2 – all editions except Starter Edition
• Windows 7 (x86 and x64) – all editions except Starter Edition
• Installation requires 4 GB of free disk space on the system drive.
• 3 GB RAM
• Windows Phone Emulator requires a DirectX 10 or above capable graphics card with a WDDM 1.1 driver

I must admit I glanced at that list and just saw the '3GB RAM". That pretty much meant I could not do this in a virtual machine as I don't have any box here with more than 4GB of RAM. I don't have a box that has Windows 7 on it natively either, so I found an old 80GB drive and begain setting up an old core 2 duo tower box I have. First I had trouble installing Windows 7 on the box. I knew I had installed Windows 7 before on it, and it eventually transpired that the Windows 7 install hated the USB audio device I had temporarily plugged in. Then I downloaded Windows 7 SP1, then I did the SDK install off this page.

The SDK install chugged along and eventually installed. Then I had a go at the MiniBrowser tutorial. That all went good until I went to run it in the emulator. The Windows Phone 7 emulator started up OK, but everytime I tried to get the mini browser to load a web page the screen was blank. Eventually I figured out that the warning that popped up before the emulator launched telling me that my graphics card was possibly not good enough actually meant that most of the emulator does not work at all. It seems that even though I had DirectX11, my graphics card was using WDDM 1.0 drivers and hence did not really want to work at all with the emulator (I reread the requirements which mentions that a WDDM 1.1 capable driver is required). I have an old Nvidia Geforce 7300 LE which I have always thought was overkill since I don't play any games on this system. However it is apparently not good enough to emulate a telephone ;-)