Some of us like to be very adventurous when it comes to developing. Whether it be deving on an incomplete OS or just trying to make different versions of software run somewhere in a place where they never were intended to run.

My first post is targeted at getting you started and ready to develop.

I have a few recommendations before I start giving orders.

Download a desktop based cloud service application (Skydrive or DropBox). I recommend Skydrive because you get a larger amount of free storage and it’s just as widely supported as any other cloud based service. This can be used as your workspace to develop on. Besides keeping your valuable documents in Skydrive in the event of losing your OS and backing it up automatically, it will back up any projects you are working which can be a time saver if you take advantage of it.
Find an easy to use Source Control System that works with Visual Studio (PS you will need a better version of version of Visual Studio to support source control). I recommend TFSPreview, I am using that with my project Go Rails, TFS preview doesn’t require your project to be open source. But if you want to contribute to the Open Source Community feel free to use CodePlex.
Continuing with TFSPreview, you should setup a project, they have a good tutorial which will provide you more than enough info to get that configured, but of course you can also just comment below.

Download and install Visual Studio

I recommend doing this first, currently I was only successful downloading a version of 2010 which supports Source Control, as students you should have access to Dreamspark, Dreamspark should be your friend when it comes to getting the applications you need to dev successfully. If you are interested in doing good UI’s you should get yourself Expression Blend 3 or newer. If you don’t have access to Dreamspark check with your school to see if they have MSDNAA subscriptions.

Get Visual Studio up and running. As a side note, I recommended 2010 because 2012 was giving issues recognizing the Phone SDK and another VS Plugin I am using. Download Service pack 1 and install it.

Download and install Windows Phone SDK

This is also a given, it is found on App Hub, the tools are free, registration to deploy phones to devices and publish is not (if you are NOT a student), of course this requires a dreamspark account and have that activated in App Hub. The process can be pretty difficult, you have to be persistent and don’t give up if it doesn’t go that smoothly as you hoped.

The installation should be very straight forward, You should experience an XNA Game Studio error, so what you need to do is go here and download the latest client and rerun the install as ‘repair’. It should fix the problem when you open visual studio, you should see new Silverlight for windows phone project templates which you can use to start with.

Next thing to do is install the 7.11 SDK update, you can read here more about it but the problem comes when you want to debug with the emulator so you need an update to get it running.

The download link is here.

You should be able to make a helloworld app and debug it on your emulator now.

Download and install Silverlight Toolkit

This is a must if you want better controls to work with. It includes your date/time pickers, drop down lists (listpicker) and a bunch of other controls which I find extremely useful in many cases. As a side note for HubTile there may still be a bug with a see through back when they flip. So you may have to look for the updated fix for the HubTile.

Advertising SDK if you want some ADs

Ads bring in Revenue, often times more revenue than just setting a price on your app. So if you want to make some good money, you’re going to want download them from here, they have some simple steps to help get you started.

Final notes and you should be good

I’m not going to walk you through making a hello world app. But before you start hitting debug. Remember you are on Windows 8, W8 has some issues which I have yet to figure out how to resolve. The biggest one is that the emulator doesn’t work properly. Like I mentioned there is an unofficial patch until Visual Studio 2012 is supported for Windows Phone development. But of course the best thing to do is use a phone to debug with.

Another Ah-Ha moment can happen when you are adding your TFS to Visual Studio 2010, this guy provided me with an easy solution to that problem. You will have to download a patch, but you will be happy to have source control!

Just Remember TFS Preview is still beta, and that’s why it’s free (for now) so enjoy it and make sure you keep a backup of your app source code.

Thanks for Reading.