Tamir Khason – Just code

Installation of Windows Phone SDK 8.0 on Windows 7

In order to ignite my comeback to the community I decided to start from Windows Phone development. First of all, I downloaded WPSDK 8 and start it installation on my good old Windows 7 x64 machine.

What’s the hack? Why it wants me to install Windows 8 with all those tiles on my screen? Digging deeper inside the reasons, I found that the root cause of this strange requirement is WP (not Word Press, Windows Phone) emulator which takes advantage on Hyper-V technology on Windows 8. But who cares about it. Real heroes can live without emulators. So, let’s start hacking WPSDK installer.

Let’s see first what WPExpress_full.exe is.  52 61 72 21 1a 07 00! SFX module detected. It’s CAB inside. Let’s see

Very nice. Let’s take a look onto main file (0). This is WiX installer. So let’s unpack this msi pack.

Interesting… Custom UI by using Burn and ManagedUx from WiX SDK. Other words without recreation of WiX project it is almost impossible to recover the installer. So even if

<UxBlocker ShortName="CheckX64runningWin2008ServerOrWin8" Type="Stop" Condition="(VersionNT < v6.1) OR ((VersionNT = v6.1) AND (NTProductType < 3)) OR (NOT VersionNT64)" DisplayText="#loc.Win8X64Block"/>

can be changed, we’ll be unable to recompile it. Let’s try the other way.

Inside manifest.xml we can find a list of all packets with it sources. So we can download all of those and install it one by one using the order from the manifest.

<Payload Id="ssceruntime_x64_msi" FilePath="packages\SSCE40\SSCERuntime_x64-enu.exe" FileSize="2638632" Hash="E33F355F5E83D93099A732E2ECE02E07818B2696" CertificateRootPublicKeyIdentifier="D37F6D0F2894D56049061A44596FFA88CBFD1B5B" CertificateRootThumbprint="19F8F76F4655074509769C20349FFAECCECD217D" DownloadUrl="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=257082&amp;clcid=0×409" Packaging="external" SourcePath="packages\SSCE40\SSCERuntime_x64-enu.exe" /><Payload Id="vcRuntimeMinimum_x64" FilePath="packages\vcRuntimeMinimum_amd64\vc_runtimeMinimum_x64.msi" FileSize="155648" Hash="CA08E6E42C30B01D27738E9F3191BEFF4C183D42" CertificateRootPublicKeyIdentifier="D37F6D0F2894D56049061A44596FFA88CBFD1B5B" CertificateRootThumbprint="19F8F76F4655074509769C20349FFAECCECD217D" DownloadUrl="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=257083&amp;clcid=0×409" Packaging="external" SourcePath="packages\vcRuntimeMinimum_amd64\vc_runtimeMinimum_x64.msi" /><Payload Id="vcRuntimeAdditional_x86" FilePath="packages\vcRuntimeAdditional_x86\vc_runtimeAdditional_x86.msi" FileSize="155648" Hash="0BEB1DB386D9E75E68C9E35EA2C426548570DDBB" CertificateRootPublicKeyIdentifier="D37F6D0F2894D56049061A44596FFA88CBFD1B5B" CertificateRootThumbprint="19F8F76F4655074509769C20349FFAECCECD217D" DownloadUrl="http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=257085&amp;clcid=0×409" Packaging="external" SourcePath="packages\vcRuntimeAdditional_x86\vc_runtimeAdditional_x86.msi" />
…

This method works. However, when I installed it I found some other annoyances related to XAML editor, which crashes Blend (but old school default XML editor method works ) and Windows Phone 8 emulator is non-functional.

At the end we have WPDSK 7.1 fully functional, XML editor for XAML, non-functional emulator and voilà working WPDSK 8.0 running on Windows 7.

Is it good or bad thing – you decide. But, as always, do not be greedy and let developers work with their operating systems. Do not try to make people reinstall their work machines only for one SDK.

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February 18th, 2013 · Comments (4)