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October 30, 2012
Windows Phone Developer Blog

New tools for Windows Phone 8 save developers time and money



The Windows Phone developer ecosystem is enriched every day by companies, communities, and people who are creating offerings and resources to help developers quickly and easily build or port great apps for Windows Phone. Over the past year, we’ve started collecting these offerings, and we’ve created a list of Windows Phone Developer partner resources, in which we identify commercial and open-source resources in the following categories:

  • Tools: Development environments, utilities, frameworks, and libraries to help you build, generate, and debug apps during the development process.
  • UI components: UI elements like list controls, button, charting, and other visual components,
  • Web API: Cloud-based services like notification, mapping, back-end processing, ad networks, and leaderboard services that developers can consume through a web API.
ThirtyPlusPartners

We’ve seen strong response to these offers, so we’re focusing even more attention in this area for Windows Phone 8. We’re thrilled to highlight today more than 30 commercial and open-source offerings by companies and organizations that have jumped on board.
On the open-source front, we engaged with communities early in the process so they could add Windows Phone 8 support in popular tools and frameworks. Read the details.

Let’s take a closer look at the partners who are announcing today their support for Windows Phone 8 at the //BUILD conference.

Native gaming

One significant feature of the Windows Phone 8 development platform is support for the native C++ programming model. Native code offers a number of benefits related to code reuse, and it opens up opportunities for game engines, physics, animation, audio libraries, and more. The following organizations are announcing Windows Phone 8 support:

Tools, cross-platform frameworks, HTML5, libraries, and UI

We’re seeing growing support for Windows Phone 8 among cross-platform tools, frameworks, and libraries vendors. Many of them take advantage of extensive support for HTML5 in Internet Explorer 10. Here’s what’s new:

On the C#/XAML development side, partners and communities have been getting ready. Here are the early birds who are supporting Windows Phone 8:

  • MVVM Light Toolkit gets a fresh new version that supports Windows Phone 8. Read the details on Laurent Bugnion’s blog.
  • Telerik today released a new version of its RadControls, with new, unique controls for Windows Phone 8.  //Build attendees can visit Telerik on the Expo floor.
  • Infragistics now includes Windows Phone 8 support with its NetAdvantage offering. //Build attendees can visit Infragistics on the Expo floor
  • XAML Spy, the visual runtime inspector debugging tool from First Floor Software, adds support for Windows Phone 8 today.
  • Xamarin releases Xamarin.Mobile, a single API developers can use for common device services like contacts, camera, and geolocation, with Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 support. //Build attendees can visit Xamarin on the Expo floor

Web API, back ends as a service, cloud services

Cloud-based service providers are essential for developers to be able to expand app capabilities, connect users and scale, promote and monetize, analyze usage, and track issues. Today at //Build, we’re presenting the partners who are aligning with Windows Phone 8 in this area.

bsquare

Finally, Bsquare, a Microsoft Gold Certified partner that specializes in providing engineering services and production-ready software products for the smart device market, launched today a porting service publishers can use to port existing apps from various platforms to Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8 quickly and affordably, with prices starting at $10,000 (USD).

Welcome, everybody, to the Windows Phone 8 developer ecosystem!

Here’s a snapshot of today’s partner announcements:

WPDevEcosystem

If you want to suggest a resource, feel free to contact me on Twitter @jccim, include the hashtag #wpdevecosystem with a description and link.