Windows Phone 7 emulator hacked. Sweet, sweet secrets spill out.

As anyone in the history of ever who has ever written a single line of code that might be subject to hacking knows, the only way to keep something “hidden” in an application is to just not include it at all. Sure, you can obfuscate the hell out of it out in the source code, or add some crazy configuration value that enables it; just don’t expect either of those to work for much longer than 5 minutes.

Either the WP7 team didn’t get that memo, or they’re perfectly comfortable with people unlocking a bunch of features in the emulator that didn’t come enabled by default.

A gent who’s now looking to have his name removed from the project managed to tear apart the ROM included with the WP7 development tools and flip a few switches that shouldn’t necessarily have been switched. Where as the original emulator set up would only show Internet Explorer and a tile or two, the hacked ROM brings out the Live Tiles, Voice Search, and Hubs. Better yet, it shows off a few fancy new features that have never been seen, including a file explorer and a task manager.

Pocketnow has a nice little write-up on how to get the hacked ROM up and running in your own emulator – but if you’re not feeling too tinkery, check out the shots of the file manager and task manager below.