Microsoft had released Windows 8 Release Preview which can be downloaded from the Official Windows 8 website. Windows 8 includes some interesting features like Live Tiles, Windows 8 UI (Code named “Metro”) and more importantly the UI which looks almost the same like my Windows Phone 🙂
What is Windows 8 Apps?
The Windows 8 Apps is somewhat different from the traditional desktop apps which runs in the full screen mode with a chrome less window and supporting different Layouts and that works well with the touch based devices.
One of the important aspect of the Windows 8 UI is the tiles instead of the icons.
Since, Windows 8 (Final version) is set to be released sometime during October/November this year, I thought of getting few apps developed for Windows 8 i.e. Windows 8 Style UI Apps and hence started learning them from last few weeks.
As a part of my learning, I will sharing some of my knowledge on tips, How Tis etc. on the Windows 8 Development in the upcoming posts.
In the first blog post of this series, I will explain on how one can get started with the Windows 8 App Development.
If you want to develop Apps for Windows 8, you should be knowing the development environment that is required for creating the apps for Windows 8.
You can create Windows 8 Apps using
- Web Technologies like HTML5, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and JavaScript.
- XAML using C++, C# or Visual Basic
To develop Windows 8 apps, you require the following
1. Windows 8 Release Preview
You can download Windows 8 Release Preview from the Official Windows 8 Release Preview Website.
2. Windows 8 Developer Tools and SDK
You can download the Windows 8 Developer Tools and SDK from Windows Dev Center – Metro style apps website .
The Windows 8 Developer Tools and SDK includes different tools like
- Microsoft Visual Studio Express 2012 RC for Windows 8
- Blend for Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 RC for Windows 8
- Windows 8 SDK
- Various project templates for creating Windows 8 apps.
If you have installed Visual Studio 2012 RC, then it would already contain the necessary tools or templates for developing Windows 8 Apps.
