Collect Your Tools

Now that you have decided to create an app and figured out what you want to put in that app, you'll need the tools to make that happen.

Necessary tools

• Computer running Windows 8 or 8.1.  If you want to run an emulator, you'll also need a computer that supports Hyper-V, such as most any Intel Core i3/i5/i7 machine.
  
  If you don't have a Windows Phone device, you'll need a computer that can run an emulator; otherwise, you won't be able to develop Windows Phone Apps. 

• Web browser
• Visual Studio Professional 2013 ("VS Pro", the 2012 version with Update 3 will also do fine)
• XPlatformCloudKit (XPCK)

Nice to have tools

• A Windows 8 Phone - the emulators in Visual Studio only go so far.  Many kinds of testing come more naturally on a physical device.
  
  If you don't have a computer that can run the emulator, you can still run and debug Windows Phone Apps if you have a real Windows Phone.
• Yahoo Pipes - for doing all kinds of cool things with RSS feeds, especially picking parts of a feed and reordering a series of blog posts or videos.

The rest of this series is based on the idea that you are modifying a copy of XPlatformCloudKit to be your app.

This is vitally important for two reasons.  First, XPCK uses a Portable Class Library so you only develop the code once for it to run on both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 -- two apps for the price of one development effort (sort of).  The downside is that Portable Class Libraries require the Professional version of Visual Studio (or better).  PCLs won't work with the free Express versions of Visual Studio.  I will add another series to this blog later on that talks about starter kits you can use with Visual Studio Express versions to create apps, but for now you need Visual Studio Professional 2013 (or 2012 Update 3).

[VS Pro costs money].  If you have that lying around, more power to you.  It's a great tool and well worth the investment if you don't already have it.  If you don't have the money, you have some options.  As a student you can sign up for DreamSpark and then get VS Pro for free.  If you are not a student but are willing to fill out some paperwork and go through a mini-startup process, you can sign up for BizSpark and get VS Pro and other tools for free as well.

The other importance of XPCK is due to the nature of the apps you can develop with it.  I repeat this from the last post, but it's worth the repetition.

The essence of an XPlatformCloudKit app is to display content in a list of groups.

This means that you either create some content yourself or find some content somewhere else.  Content in this case means text, pictures, music and videos.  The content is organized in groups and shown in lists, showing a picture and a title for each item of content.