Windows Phone 8 SDK is Now Available to Download

At the Windows Phone 8 launch yesterday Microsoft's Joe Belfiore promised everyone that the Windows Phone 8 software development kit will be available at the start of build, the company's developer conference. Sure enough, the SDK is now available to download from Microsoft. The event has kicked off and developers are set to dig in.

The wait is over, the Windows Phone SDK 8.0 is now available. ENJOY! microsoft.com/en-us/download… — Norman Sasono (@nsasono) October 30, 2012

The lack of SDK for Windows Phone 8 until today had been a sore point for mobile developers looking to build apps for the new platform. While other platforms tend to release SDKs for upcoming versions months before the public release, Microsoft had waited until the operating system was officially launched.

A number of developers at the Sparxup Hackathon in September had expressed their disappointment that they could not build apps using the new SDK but as it turned out, there were some pretty good apps that came out of that event.

Microsoft had moved to assure developers that applications built using the older SDK would work just fine on the new mobile OS and it would provide a greater flexibility since the apps would be available to consumers using Windows Phone 7.5 as well as Windows Phone 8.

However, there had been limitations in the older SDK that bound developers to use non-native development resources, whereas the new OS allows native development and a greater reach into the system to allow more flexibility and better features.

Despite all that, Microsoft had managed to get developers to create more than 120 thousand apps for Windows Phone and nearly all of the top 50 mobile apps are now available for the platform.

While there may be concerns as to the quality of the apps, it seems that for most purposes, they work just fine which means the additional abilities made possible with the new SDK should make them even better.

Unfortunately while apps made for Windows Phone 7 devices will be available for Windows Phone 8 devices, the reverse is not true. Due to the underlying structure and framework for WP8, the older devices will not be able to launch apps made for the new kids on the block.

Application developers will now have to decide whether they want to embrace the brand new platform but alienate existing customers or forgo the more advanced abilities but allow customers to install their apps on older devices, which happen to still work perfectly fine. To help developers with creating apps for both Windows Phone 7 and 8, Microsoft has launched the new Windows Phone developer platform, hosted on the dev center.

Don't be surprised however if six months from now, the majority of the new and popular applications on the Windows Phone Store will require Windows Phone 8 to be installed