So the windows phone 7 emulator was a simply another process , the windows phone 8 emulators are actually Hyper V machines , would like to know what were the advantages of making this shift , from a user perspective debugging has now become a pain for me because I need a security exception from my domain admin and fiddler does not work easily either ? Does this design change have multiple benefits which is why it was made ?
Windows Phone 7 uses virtualPC to run emulators. VirtualPC has been unsupported by Microsoft for some years now, but works perfectly to run WindowsCE images. Windows Phone 8 uses a more powerful and resources consuming kernel: WindowsNT and HyperV is the new virtualization platform from Microsoft so the logic path is to update emulators to use HyperV technology. HyperV allows to address better graphics capabilities than VirtualPC and play's better with multiple networks, also the performance is much better than VirtualPC... hope this helps you resolve your question.