Top dev resources for Windows Consumer Preview

Just a few months after the Developer Preview, the Windows team has released the Windows 8 Consumer preview. In case you didn’t notice, we have been working our butts off.

So, if you’re foaming at the mouth to get the latest dev bits, you’re probably wondering what’s next to do…

  1. Download the Consumer Preview (ISO) / (Web installer)
  2. Get the VS11 Express bits if you are developing for Metro / Get VS11 Pro if you are a Desktop or hardware developer
  3. Get the Windows SDK for Consumer Preview
  4. Learn how to develop for Windows on the Windows Dev Center

Watch the Jensen Video

If you have an existing app, you can find out if it’s supported by visiting the Windows 8 Compat Center and can address common issues using the Windows 8 App Compatibility Cookbook.

If you entered the Windows 8 first Apps Contest, the winners have been announced,

Having played around with the developer content extensively, I have a few tips for finding some key pages:

The Windows Metro Development Roadmap for JavaScript and Windows Metro Development Roadmap for C# are your buddies.  These pages behave as hubs (spoke and hub model) on the dev center and contain key resources to get you going fast.  Think of them as one stop shops for quickstarts, feature overviews, and other shortcuts to getting into the code.  Bookmark them in your browser and never have trouble finding the code you need again (we hope!).
The UX Guidelines for Metro style apps have tons of pro tips on Metro style design and the new user interactions for Windows 8. Bookmark this page and read them repeatedly until you can whip together Metro style interfaces with your eyes shut.  This content is the how and what of Metro UX/UI.

The User Experience (UX) design patterns for Metro style apps page has the best design resources for common patterns we anticipate developers to use. Read these pages and pay attention, following these design guidelines is what will ensure that your app will fit in with Windows and really gets into the why of Metro UX/UI.

You can check out the article I wrote with Chris Jones, Developing reader apps, which should get you started with a few concepts that I have mentioned before in the blog post: 3 Killer HTML5 and CSS3 features for JavaScript apps [grid, regions, media queries]. You can even download the associated sample, Dynamic CSS Region Templates.  You can pop over to http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/windowsapps and can also get updates to all the samples that were shipped at Build and even a few new ones.

If this isn’t enough, you can read my notes from the past couple months on Windows 8 programming:

Read the official announcements here: