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Comment by fidotron | Hacker News Reader

This is also symptomatic of the way Windows clients have fallen out of favour with many devs generally. Android people have enough trouble persuading them (and designers) that the world isn't just Apple, but having a toolchain that requires Windows desktop? Instant not-going-to-happen.

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Yes. It feels philosophically unfair to complain about, but I want a Windows Phone emulator for OS X. Of course, Windows users don't get an emulator for iOS either, but Apple has popularity on their side.

Couldn't you technically run Windows 7/8 under VMWare and then run the Windows Phone tools under that? VMWare has nested virtualisation (at least on Workstation 10 on Windows, think its there on Fusion or the Paralles options). And given MS give free VMs for testing IE on Macs too, your a step closer...

Last time I tried, no. This is going from memory so I may be incorrect, but the WP emulator required some level of hardware virtualisation that VirtualBox (at least) could not offer in that nested way.

Parallels supports this nested virtualization. The WP 8.1 emulator requires HyperV which Parallels supports. I've managed to get this working on a Mac with a Parallels VM running Windows 8.1 running a Windows Phone 8.1 VM. It... worked, but needed lots of memory.

You can get a free VM from MS to test under IE at https://modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools

On the mac, they are support VMWare, VirtualBox and Parallells.

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