As we head into the final stretch of consumer voting in the Windows Phone Next App Star contest, I wanted reach out to the developer community with an update. We created the contest to shine the spotlight on your creations, and to help get these apps...

The Visual Studio 3D Starter Kit, which shows you how to use common capabilities in 3-D apps and games, has been updated to support Windows Phone 8. With support for Windows Phone 8, code and assets are shared as much as possible in this update of the...

In Windows Phone OS 7.1, Microsoft introduced the background agents feature which enables you to periodically run a small piece of code in the background. The same technology is used for background audio playback , and in Windows Phone 8 it was extended...

We’re at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco today showing developers just how fast and efficient it is to port their existing games to Windows Phone. Window Phone 8 unlocks a world-class game developer platform with support for native...

UPDATE 3/20: The Windows Phone Next App Star voting site is back up. To ensure fairness, votes cast yesterday will not be counted. However, yesterday’s voters are still eligible for the March 19 free phone drawing . UPDATE 3/19 : We’ve taken the voting...

This blog post was authored by Ben Riga, a Technical Evangelist on the Microsoft Developer and Platform Evangelism team. You can find out more about Ben at http://about.me/ben.riga . - Larry It’s no secret that we built Windows Phone 8 on a shared Windows...

This blog post was authored by Himadri Sarkar, a program manager on the Windows Phone team. - Adam You may have heard that with the Windows Phone SDK 8.0 release, the SQLite database engine is fully supported on the Windows Phone platform. Many thanks...

This blog post was authored by Joao Lucas Guberman Raza, a program manager on the Windows Phone team. - Adam ANID and ANID2 ANID (anonymous ID) and ANID2 are hashed representations of the Microsoft account the user has entered on the device...

This blog post was authored by Dan Zucker, a program manager on the Windows Phone team. - Adam As part 2 of this two-part series, this post focuses on the great new Multilingual App Toolkit (MAT) v1.2 offered by the Windows International team...

We’re joining Core77 to present the five winners of the App to the Future challenge where designers were asked to create an app concept that helps them connect or delight their future self. Submissions were vast, with three times the amount of...

Our resident app developer, Bernardo Zamora, joins me today for a Question & Answer post, highlighting two ways to think about marketing your apps for increased discovery and downloads. Bernardo works on the Windows Phone Store team and has published...