“Annoyed” is one word I would use to describe my feelings when I learnt that Windows Phone development was impossible on Windows 8 and that similarly Metro development in the Visual Studio 11 beta was denied for Windows 7 users.

Thankfully Microsoft has released an update to the Windows Phone SDK that unblocks the running on the Windows Phone emulator on Windows 8. This ability will not be officially supported by Microsoft and performance will be degraded if Hyper-V is enabled in Windows 8.

Due to the update containing two virtual OS images, the update’s size comes in at just under 300 MB.

On another positive note for Microsoft, CodePlex announced last week that it has moved to supporting Git for source control. Git support is a feature that the CodePlex community had been after for some time.

Meanwhile, I will be re-evaluating my frustrating decision to split my Windows 7 laptop into a Windows 7 and Windows 8 dual-boot simply to develop for Windows Phone and Windows 8 Metro applications. But do I really want to solely use Windows 8 on that machine? I sense more frustration approaching.