try windows mobile 7 on your PC right now

Microsoft sure is busy with its best mobile OS yet - The Windows Mobile 7. Its slated to release sometime late 2010, maybe sooner or maybe a bit later. A few prototypes of the phone were showcased in major international technology conventions and a lucky few got to try it too! But for the rest of us folks who never had an opportunity to be there at the event, here's how you can try windows mobile 7 on your PC right now!!

To get started, you need a few pre-requisites:
1. The Visual studio express edition for Win mob 7 [here]
2. The Windows mobile 7 rom [here]
3. A Windows PC (XP's not supported)

After you have downloaded your developer studio, proceed to install it. It will give you options for XNA or Silverlight based developer environment, leave them at defaults or choose the one that suits you best. A system restart is recommended after the full installation is complete.

Now fire up your Microsoft Visual studio 2010 and you will be shown the workspace.

Choose "New Project" and it doesnt matter if you choose either XNA based or Silverlight based template. Once all your compiler libraries are loaded, hit F5 on your keyboard or the tiny green play button above to enter debug mode. In short, we are executing the ROM in windows phone emulator environment. You should see something similar to this.

This is the Windows Mobile 7 emulator which tries to simulate the look and feel of the actual Windows phone 7. But the catch is, Microsoft has totally ripped off nearly 80% of the applications from this ROM.,but we do have a workaround!

Now that we have confirmed that its loaded and running successfully, close down the emulator. Exit the Visual Studio 2010 and proceed to unzip the windows mobile 7 ROM that you have downloaded earlier. The extract process should give you a *.BIN file. This is our compile phone ROM. We need to replace this with the Visual Studio 2010's inbuilt Windows mobile ROM.

Navigate to the following Location. "Root" is your primary boot hard drive. Its usually C:\

Root:/program Files/Microsoft SDKs/WindowsPhone/v7.0/Emulation/Images

There should be a single BIN file inside, just rename the extension to something like .BAK. Now copy your downloaded custom ROM to this folder, rename it exactly as the old one, it should be WM70C1.bin

Now start Visual Studio 2010 again and start a new project. This time, the IDE should load the New ROM we provided instead of the old one. Hit F5 and enter the emulator mode. Within seconds, you should have the Windows phone 7's UI loaded and ready to play! Hope you had fun with the new windows phone :)

Here's a youtube video that I uploaded of Windows phone 7


Reference source Gizmondo