Install Windows Phone 7 tools on Windows Server 2008

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, where I describe how to install the Zune software on Windows Server 2008, the Windows Phone 7 tools do not install on Windows Server 2008 as easily as on other “workstation” versions of Windows (Windows Vista, Windows 7). Once again, this is perfectly understandable since a server version of Windows is not aimed for application development purposes. However, since I installed Windows Server 2008 on my machine for training purposes, and since I don’t have enough computers at home to have one dedicated for this server version of Windows, I searched for a way to force the installation of these WP7 tools. Luckily (thanks to Aaron Stebner); I found a way as described in this post... But before going any further, I must mention that this is not officially supported by Microsoft, so do it (or not) at your own risks. Since my motivations were only training, that doesn’t matter to me.

1.       Download the Windows Phone Developer Tools web boot strapper from here and save it on your hard drive. It is just a 3.2 MB file;

2.       Open a command prompt window and type vm_web.exe /x to extract the contents of the setup package. You’ll have to indicate a location in which the files will be unzipped;

3.       Navigate to the extracted folder and open the file baseline.dat file in notepad;

4.       Look for the section named [gencomp7788];

5.       Change the value InstallOnLHS from 1 to 0;

6.       Change the value InstallOnWin7Server from 1 to 0;

7.       Save and close baseline.dat;

8.       Run setup.exe /web from the folder extracted to in step 2.

You can now develop Windows Phone 7 apps and games on your Windows Server 2008 machine. Please note that Visual Studio 2010 is required and that it installs without any particular problem on Windows Server 2008.