When the Windows 8 Consumer Preview version was released last week, one group of people who were not all that happy were developers of Windows Phone apps. Why? The SDK for Windows Phone is currently not compatible with Windows 8. In a new post on the Windows Phone Developer blog site, Microsoft"s Larry Lieberman goes over the reasons why this is happening.
One issues deals with XNA Game Studio. Installing the Windows Phone SDK on Windows 8 will cause "the user [to] receive [an] error messages with regard to components of the XNA tool chain." However, there is a workaround that has been made for this issue.
The second problem is with the Windows Phone Emulator; in the simplest terms, it won"t run on Windows 8. Finally, there"s NET 3.5. Lieberman states, "Capability.exe and slsvcutil.exe will not run on Win 8 unless you separately install .NET 3.5."
The good news is that Microsoft is working to fix all of these Windows 8 problems with the Windows Phone SDK; the company promises to relay more information in the coming week.
Also, the new beta for Visual Studio 11 also does not allow for the creation of Windows Phone apps. All is not lost, though. Lieberman states, " ... there absolutely will be support for building Windows Phone applications with the next version of Visual Studio by the time it RTMs."