Installing Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools on XP

I have an old development machine at home that still runs XP. Shoot me. The damn thing works fine and I’m not about to drop the money to upgrade the OS and hardware. I do from time to time like to use it for things it’s not designed for. I recently got an invitation to update my Windows Phone to the latest release of Mango. Well after reading the instructions I noticed I had to install the Windows Phone SDK 7.1, requirements are Vista or Windows 7. Problem.

Solution I found for this was the following:

1. Download the Windows Phone Developer Tools RTW from Microsoft Download Center
2. Extract the downloaded package by running vm_web.exe /x
3. Go to the folder of the extracted package & open the file baseline.dat in any text editor
4. Look for the ‘gencomp7788’ section and change this two entries from 1 to 0:
* InstallOnLHS=0
* InstallOnWinXP=0
5. Save the file baseline.dat
6. Run setup.exe /web

Thanks to Red Frogfish for this information. Hope this helps others.