Alternatives for Windows Phone 8 development - windows-phone-8

I researched a little, and I found nothing, unless the Windows Phone SDK, that couldn't install on Windows 7 operating system...
There is another way, another SDK, another language, to create Windows Phone 8 applications? For instance, can I use QT for this purpose?
Thanks in advance.

No, Windows 8 or 8.1 are required. QT generates a Visual Studio project which needs to be built with Visual Studio 2013 on Windows 8.1
If you don't want to upgrade your main system to Windows 8 you can run it in a VM, although there will be issues running the emulator so you may need a physical phone to test (depending on your computer you may need that anyway: modern computers almost all support Hyper-V, but older Windows 7 era computers are more likely not to).

You can use javascript and html5 through cordova phonegap or winjs from Microsoft.

Related

WP 8.1 backward compatability to WP8

I have started working on WP 8.1 lately. There was VS Express 2012 exclusively for WP8. I have installed VS Express 2013 for Windows.
My question is, if I develop for WP 8.1 does it work for WP8 too? There are a lot of changes in WP 8.1. Please guide me in this,
Thanks.
If you use features which target 8.1, they won't work on 8.0. If 8.0 is of such importance you need to build both versions and verify that they work.
Frankly since most windows phone users can easily and cheaply upgrade their phone, if not OS to 8.1, I would only program for version 8.1 and not concern myself with a legacy market which is only getting smaller every day.

Can we develop Windows Phone 8 app on Windows 7 machine?

Can I develop a Windows Phone 8 application on Windows 7 OS?
If yes, what would be the system requirements (both hardware and software) on Windows 7 machine?
If no, what would be the system requirements (both hardware and software) on Windows 8 machine?
Can I run Windows Phone 8 Emulator on Windows 7 machine? If yes, what would be the system requirements (both hardware and software)?
Do I need Zune software to register my Windows Phone 8 to deploy and test my app?
Yes, you can, but the Phone Emulator will only work on Windows 8 as far as I know. For developing (and testing on a real phone instead of the emulator), Windows 7 works - all you need is either Visual Studio 2012 with the Phone SDK installed, or Visual Studio 2013 (which includes the Phone SDK already). For developing Phone 8.1 apps, VS 2013 is mandatory
In addition, to run the Phone 8 Emulator, check this MSDN link for the hardware requirements.
I'm not sure about (5) the Zune software, but I think it's not necessary any more with the Phone 8.0 platform.

Difference between Windows 8, Windows 8 RT, Windows Phone 8

We have an app written for iOS and Android. How we are thinking over supporting it for some Windows platforms. I can see there are three modern mobile Windows platforms at now:
Windows 8
Windows RT
Windows Phone 8
As I understand, Windows 8 and Windows RT differs only in that former is for Intel and latter is for ARM. But what about Windows Phone 8? If we port our app to Windows 8 (and Windows RT), would it run on Windows Phone 8? Or vice-versa? What is relation between these platforms? What percentage of smartphones/tablets does run any of these platforms?
The Windows platforms:
You are right, Windows 8 Apps and Windows 8 RT Apps are (in the most common cases) the same so you usually don't have to worry that your Windows 8 App does not run on a Windows 8 RT device.
The Windows Phone platform is slightly different. You can reuse very much of your code from the Windows 8 App but most controls lay in different libraries and some behaviours change between these platforms. By now!
Some days ago at //build conference Microsoft introduced Windows Phone 8.1 and much has become easier!
Cross platform Windows development:
If you start developming for mobile Windows platforms as Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone now you should definately take a look at the new Universal App Model.
Since the upcoming Windows Phone 8.1 Update, both platforms share the same code base. With the Universal App Model you can share your code between both platforms and only have to define different layouts for the GUI. You can compile your project both for Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1 then, which is really cool!
Both the Windows 8.1 Update and Windows Phone 8.1 Update are available for every Windows Phone 8 respectively Windows 8 device. So you don't have to worry to exclude useres when "only" developing for the latest version of both platforms.
Percentage of smartphones/tablets users on these platforms:
If you use the Universal App Model there is no question whether to develop for Windows 8 OR Windows Phone 8. You automatically develop for both. Users will love you for that!
For more information read this blog post.
Hope that helps :)
Windows 8 and Windows 8 RT both support Windows Store Apps without any additional work. You write it once, publish it to Windows Store, and it's downloadable on both OS's.
It used to be that you needed to develop a separate app for Windows Phone 8 because it has a separate app store and essentially a separate OS (although parts of it are shared with W8). You could share some of the core logic code but the UI parts needed to be different since WP8 has different resolutions and different controls. And you'd compile different packages depending on your target OS.
But it's a very recent development that supposedly you're able to now develop once and target all 3 of these OS's, although I have not tried this yet. You can find more details here:
http://readwrite.com/2014/04/03/microsoft-universal-windows-app-store-developers-unified-code-base#awesm=~oCPndkNofb18zX

Which Windows edition to use as a build server for Windows Phone 8 projects?

We plan to create virtual machine to serve as a build server for our Windows Phone 8 projects. According to the official requirements the WP8 SDK runs only on Windows 8. The question is is it possible to install the VS2012 and WP8 SDK also on Windows Server 2012, or should we just use the supported Windows 8?
Note we use Hyper-V for hosting virtual machines and also we don't need the WP8 emulator on that build server.
As a possible alternative (as I haven't tested your issue of building on WS 2012), why don't you use TFS online? It allows for 5 free projects (privately hosted in the cloud). See more here: http://tfs.visualstudio.com/
More on your issue:
I have tried running the WP8 SDK on Windows 7 without any luck (but it's not supported so I understand). Also, I have tried running the WP8 SDK from a Windows 8 Virtual Machine, but the emulator did not run as Hyper-V can't run on Hyper-V without pursuing this option: http://www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/Windows_Phone_8_SDK_on_a_Virtual_Machine_with_Working_Emulator
Hope this helps in some way, shape, or form.
On my workstation are installed VS2012, WP8 SDK. All works fine.

Is it possible to port a Windows RT app to a Windows Phone app?

Just recently released an application to the Windows Store, and I'm wondering if it is possible to "downgrade" it to Windows Phone 7.1 - until Windows Phone 8 will arrive.
The real problem is with the async stuff, I've found the "Async Targeting Pack", but it requires Visual Studio 2012; however VS2012 doesn't work with the Phone SDK 7.0, 7.1.
I'm not in the mood to install old and ugly Visual Studio 2010 on my brand new Windows 8 machine :)
Does anyone know a workaround?
Windows Phone 8 has arrived and, unfortunately, it does not allow you to compile applications for Windows Phone 7.1 if the code uses async/await. You can try to port the code to Windows Phone 8 which does support async/await out of the box.
If you still want to have a WP7.1 port of your application and still use the async/await feature, you have no option other than installing VS2010 express for WP7 + async ctp 3.
Although Async Targeting Pack for Visual Studio 2012 has arrived, you cannot target WP7 projects since WP7 is Silverlight 4, and targeting pack is for Silverlight 5.
UPDATE: There is a way to compile WP7 applications on Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows Phone by using this nifty NuGet package. However, note that it is currently in prerelease version.
Well Windows Phone 8 suppose to launch tomorrow so why do you need to Downgrade your application to Windows Phone 7.1?
This article might hold's answer to your problem.
Today you may have also seen the online launch event for Visual Studio 2012. The Windows Phone SDK 8.0 is built on top of Visual Studio 2012, and will give you the ability to build applications and games that target both Windows Phone 8 as well as Windows Phone 7.5. Windows Phone SDK 7.1 can be installed side-by-side with Visual Studio 2012 and runs on Windows 8.