Odyssey of Installing Windows Phone SDK 7.1 in Windows XP

You decided to develop a Windows Phone Application, you thought that Windows Phone 8 SDK is a good opportunity to start with as Microsoft represents it as something awesome and you think that Microsoft should have covered the gap between Windows Phone 7 and Android or iOS.

You visit http://download.microsoft.com/ but Windows Phone 8 SDK is not there, but you are a newbie in Windows Phone development so you download Windows Phone 7.1 SDK in order to start....your enthusiasm does not let you to read the requirements and you have Windows Phone 7.1 SDK and a laptop with Windows XP SP3 and Visual Studio 2010...damn you should have read the Release Notes. Windows XP is not compatible with Windows Phone 7.1 SDK.

"Windows 7 or Windows Vista is required" but if you want to be nerd this cannot stop you.
You start searching and some workarounds will appear.  You can follow the steps below:

1. Download the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh
2. Extract the contents of the setup package by running vm_web.exe /x and choosing a path to extract to
3. Go to the folder you extracted to in step 2 and open the file baseline.dat in notepad
4. Look for the section named [gencomp7788]
5. Change the value InstallOnLHS from 1 to 0
6. Change the value InstallOnWinXP from 1 to 0
7. Save and close baseline.dat
8. Run setup.exe /web from the folder you extracted to in step 2

You follow the wizard and you have the SDK installed on your Windows XP computer.
After the installation you need to update to 7.1.1 (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=29233).

The Windows Phone Developer Tools includes the following

• Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone
• Windows Phone Emulator Resources
• Silverlight 4 Tools For Visual Studio
• XNA Game Studio 4.0
• Microsoft Expression Blend for Windows Phone 

Full of joy and pride that you achieved to install it you open Visual Studio, you create a blank Silverlight application and you press F5...in order to see the emulator...You cannot connect to the emulator...The following error occurs:

"The delay loading of ... or this DLL was missing an ordinal. Execution cannot continue."

This issue is due to a missing DLL called bcrypt.dll. This DLL is only included in Windows since Windows Vista. You can't copy it to your Windows XP from a Windows Vista installation, the DLL depends on new functionalities provided by ksecdd.sys. The hack consists of emulating the bcrypt functions needed by xde.exe.

Fortunately, XDA Developers Forum has the solution as you can see below:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/wiki/Windows_Phone_7_Emulator

This was the last step of the installation, restart your PC and you are ready, Happy Coding.