Windows Phone 8 Developer Platform announced

Windows Phone 8 Developer Platform launched! Microsoft are making available the most important advancement of the dev plat to date, including a new Windows Phone SDK 8.0 and a refreshed Windows Phone Dev Center now open for Windows Phone 8 app submissions.

The Windows Phone SDK 8.0 is a full-featured development environment to use for building apps and games for Windows Phone 8.0 and Windows Phone 7.5. The Windows Phone SDK provides a stand-alone Visual Studio Express 2012 edition for Windows Phone or works as an add-in to Visual Studio 2012 Professional, Premium or Ultimate editions. With the SDK, you can use your existing programming skills and code to build managed or native code apps. In addition, the SDK includes multiple emulators and additional tools for profiling and testing your Windows Phone app under real-world conditions.

System requirements

Supported operating systems: Windows 8, Windows 8 Pro

• • Windows 8 64-bit (x64) client versions

• Hardware:
  • 4 GB of free hard disk space
  • 4 GB RAM
  • 64-bit (x64) CPU
• Windows Phone 8 Emulator:
  • Windows 8 Pro edition or greater
  • Requires a processor that supports Second Level Address Translation (SLAT)
  If your computer meets the hardware and operating system requirements, but does meet the requirements for the Windows Phone 8 Emulator, the Windows Phone SDK 8.0 will install and run. However, the Windows Phone 8 Emulator will not function and you will not be able to deploy or test apps on the Windows Phone 8 Emulator.