It is not like you have a real device in your hand, but you can get some look and feel of Windows Phone using an emulator. If you have touchscreen monitor, your experience will be much better, but that’s not a requirement. You don’t need anything else installed on your system, not even Visual Studio 2010 :-)

I have tried this steps on Windows 7 machine, it should work on Vista as well. I’ve read there are some issues on Windows XP, please let me know if you try it.

1. If you don’t have Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools installed, please do the following:
   • download Microsoft XDE 1.0 (3 MB) and install 32bit or 64bit version, depending on your system (unzip and run sde_xde-enu.msi or sde_xde64-enu.msi)
   • alternatively, you can download ISO image of Windows Phone Developer Tools and run files from there (430 MB)
2. If you have Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools installed, please check version (you should have June/July 2010 version)
3. Download unlocked Windows Phone 7 ROM (92 MB), remember the folder you’ve put it in (I’ll use “C:”)
4. Run one of the following lines on your command prompt (save it to batch file for future use) – change the folder you’ve put you BIN file in!
   • “C:Program FilesMicrosoft XDE1.0XDE.exe” “C:WM70C1-6414-unlocked.bin” /VMID {E575DA31-FC47-4766-853F-018D823B9EE6}
     OR
   • “C:Program Files (x86)Microsoft XDE1.0XDE.exe” “C:WM70C1-6414-unlocked.bin” /VMID {E575DA31-FC47-4766-853F-018D823B9EE6}
5. Have fun! :-)

This walkthrough is based on Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools beta published in July 2010.
Please let me know if any link stops working :-)

I didn’t invent this – thank goes to En1gma and RustyGrom at XDA-Developers (where else? :-)).