I have been long interested to develop on the platform. I even got the tools installed already on my desktop but I can’t upgrade my WDDM from 1.0 to 1.1. To make things simple: my graphics chips are not up to the task of running the emulator.
If I still buy a Windows Phone (e.g. a Nokia Lumia) for development purposes, can I sideload and test my apps there efficiently instead of going against the emulator?
Yes, of course. It’s very easy and convenient. You have debugger and all the goodies. Advantage of the emulator is the test option for 256MB devices.