Installing the Windows Phone SDK
[This documentation is preliminary and is subject to change.]
July 23, 2012
With Windows Phone SDK 8.0 Developer Preview you can download and install in a single file everything you need to build and publish Windows Phone apps.
Windows Phone SDK 8.0 Developer Preview includes the following components:
Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone 2012 Developer Preview
Windows Phone Emulator
Blend for Visual Studio
Additional tools
You don’t need Visual Studio 2012 Professional or later versions to develop Windows Phone apps. If Visual Studio 2012 Professional or higher is already installed on your development computer, an add-in for Visual Studio 2012 is automatically installed. For more information, see Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone 2012.
Windows Phone SDK 8.0 Developer Preview installs everything you need to build and publish apps for both Windows Phone 8 Developer Preview and Windows Phone 7.1. You do not need to install Windows Phone SDK 7.1 to build apps for Windows Phone 7.1. However, if you already have Windows Phone SDK 7.1 installed, you do not have to uninstall it before you install Windows Phone SDK 8.0 Developer Preview.
This topic contains the following sections.
- Download location
- Installation options
- Hardware requirements
- Operating system requirements
- Additional requirements to test apps on Windows Phone 8 Emulator
- Additional requirement to test apps on a phone
- Localized Windows Phone SDKs
- Related Topics
Download location
You can download the Windows Phone SDK 8.0 Developer Preview files and release notes at the following location:
We recommend that you read the release notes for each download to be aware of any prerequisites.
Installation options
Windows Phone SDK 8.0 Developer Preview installs Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone 2012 Developer Preview, or adds components if you already have Visual Studio installed.
If you don’t already have Visual Studio installed, you can install Windows Phone SDK 8.0 Developer Preview on any drive.
If you have Visual Studio 2012 Professional or higher, or any other Visual Studio Express 2012 product, is already installed on your development computer, Windows Phone SDK 8.0 Developer Preview is installed on the same drive as the existing Visual Studio installation.
.gif "Important note") Important Note: |
|---|
Installation on a virtual machine is not supported. |
Hardware requirements
The following table contains the hardware requirements for Windows Phone SDK 8.0 Developer Preview.
Requirement |
How to check for this requirement |
|---|---|
64-bit processor |
In Control Panel, click System. In the View basic information about your computer pane, in the System section, verify that the value for System type is 64-bit. |
4 GB or more of RAM |
In Control Panel, click System. In the View basic information about your computer pane, in the System section, verify that the value for Installed memory (RAM) is 4 GB or more of RAM. |
Operating system requirements
You must have the 64-bit version of Windows 8 Pro.
Additional requirements to test apps on Windows Phone 8 Emulator
For additional requirements related to the emulator, see System requirements for Windows Phone Emulator.
Additional requirement to test apps on a phone
You can use Visual Studio to deploy your app to Windows Phone Emulator or to a Windows Phone device. Before you can deploy and debug your app on a Windows Phone device, you have to register your device using the Windows Phone Developer Registration Tool. For more information, see How to register your phone for development and Deploying and testing apps on your Windows Phone.
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Localized Windows Phone SDKs
The Windows Phone SDK is available in localized versions of many languages. Localized versions have the same system requirements as the English version. You can write Windows Phone apps by using the SDK localized in the following languages:
Chinese Simplified (zh-CN)
Chinese Traditional (zh-TW)
French (fr-FR)
German (de-DE)
Italian (it-IT)
Japanese (ja-JP)
Korean (ko-KR)
Russian (ru-RU)
Spanish (es-ES)
Note
You can also localize your Windows Phone apps and games in additional languages, including Greek, Indonesian, Portuguese, Swedish, and many others. For more information, see Culture and language support for Windows Phone.
Installing a localized SDK
To download a localized version of the Windows Phone SDK, on the following download page, in the language list box, select the language you want to download.
You can have only one language version of the Windows Phone SDK installed on a computer at a time. If you want to use the SDK in a different language, you’ll first need to uninstall the existing language version first, and then install the new language version.
Operating system support for localized SDKs
You can install the English version of the Windows Phone SDK on any language of the supported operating systems.
However, you can install a localized version of the Windows Phone SDK only on a supported operating system running the corresponding language. That is, the language of the localized SDK must match the language of the operating system.
Visual Studio support for localized SDKs
You can install the English and localized versions of the Windows Phone SDK on a computer that has multiple language versions of Visual Studio Professional. However, before you can use Visual Studio Professional to develop apps for Windows Phone, the language setting in Visual Studio Professional must match the language of the Windows Phone SDK. That is, the language of the SDK (including English) must match the language of Visual Studio Professional.
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