Windows Dev Center for Windows 8 Launched; Download Preview Release Now
By on September 13th, 2011

Earlier today at the keynote of   BUILD conference, Steven Sinofsky, President, Windows & Windows Live Division at Microsoft announced that developers will be able to download the Windows Developer Preview via the new Windows Dev Center. Microsoft showcased a detailed preview of the next major release of Windows, code-named Windows 8.’ The Windows Developer Preview is a pre-beta version of Windows 8 for developers. Windows Dev Center

The new Windows Dev Center dev.windows.com – has just gone live and promises to make guides, tools, samples, forums, docs and other resources to build on Windows available soon. You can download the Windows Developer Preview right away.

Download Windows 8 Developer Preview

Windows Developer Preview with developer tools English, 64-bit (x64) – DOWNLOAD (4.8 GB)

All of the following come on a disk image file (.iso).

  • 64-bit Windows Developer Preview
  • Windows SDK for Metro style apps
  • Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Express for Windows Developer Preview
  • Microsoft Expression Blend 5 Developer Preview
  • 28 Metro style apps including the BUILD Conference app

Windows Developer Preview English, 64-bit (x64) – DOWNLOAD (3.6 GB)
Includes a disk image file (.iso) to install the Windows Developer Preview and Metro style apps on a 64-bit PC.

Windows Developer Preview English, 32-bit (x86) – DOWNLOAD (2.8 GB)
Includes a disk image file (.iso) to install the Windows Developer Preview and Metro style apps on a 32-bit PC.

System Requirements

Windows Developer Preview works great on the same hardware that powers Windows Vista and Windows 7:

  • 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
  • 1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
  • 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
  • DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver
  • Taking advantage of touch input requires a screen that supports multi-touch

Note that you can’t uninstall the Windows Developer Preview. Also, the preview is available as-is, and is unsupported by Microsoft. The Windows Developer Preview is delivered as an .iso image that must be converted into installation media stored on a DVD or a USB flash drive.

Sinofsky mentioned that this developer preview will be followed by one beta version, and a release candidate before the final release. With Windows 7, a similar process took about a year to go from developer preview to final release. Microsoft hasn’t specified if and when a preview version of ARM-based version of Windows 8 will be made available.

Prior to this, all the developer information, downloads, and documentation was hosted at Microsoft’s developer portal MSDN. This included development for Windows client, and other Microsoft’s web and server technologies. With the launch of Windows Phone 7, Microsoft created App Hub, a developer portal for Windows Phone 7 app and games developers and Xbox LIVE game developers. Unless some integration or merger happens in the future around the release of Windows 8, this could create factions between developers on same technologies but on different portals.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Author: Abhishek Baxi
Abhishek Baxi is a technology enthusiast who writes about personal technology on the Web and in print, and speaks incessantly on Twitter (@baxiabhishek).

Abhishek Baxi has written and can be contacted at abhishek@techie-buzz.com.
  • http://www.tipsotricks.com/author/mbkfa93 Meena Bassem

    will it work on virtualbox ?

  • http://techie-buzz.com TJPowerBlaster

    I have a feeling we’re seeing another “skip” version of Windows. I don’t think corp America is going to jump on this version just yet.

  • Igor Kokarev

    Old visual problem with Aero interface in Windows 8

    If turn off an option “Animate windows when minimizing and maximizing” (in “Performance Options” window of Windows 8) you may see the following visual defect.

    Minimize any window to the taskbar and then click on the icon of this application in the taskbar to restore its window. At this moment you can observe a quick flash of black color (or white color) on the background of the appearing window. It happens quickly (1/10 of second) but I can catch this moment. Personally I find this visual glitch very annoying. Some applications give a black flash (Windows Explorer in Win8 WPD, Google Chrome, etc.), other applications have a white flash (Internet Explorer 10 in Win8). The more large screen resolution, the more noticeable this problem.

    1) Indeed it’s a very old bug which exists since Windows Vista, Windows 7 and now in Windows 8.

    2) And this problem occurs only with Aero Glass user interface. If you turn off desktop composition (DWM), this problem doesn’t happen at all.

    3) It occurs on any computer with Aero graphical interface, any edition of Windows 8, 7 and Vista. I tested this problem on dozens of computes with same result.

    This is the only one reason why I stays on Windows XP.

    Please fix this visual defect.

    See attached screenshots (JPEGs in ZIP), where I recorded phases of this problem for different applications:

    http://www.wnsoft.com/files/test/win8-bug/win8-bug.zip

 
Copyright 2006-2012 Techie Buzz. All Rights Reserved. Our content may not be reproduced on other websites. Content Delivery by MaxCDN