14 DAY TRIAL // Early adopters just starting to play around with the first public development milestone of Visual Studio 11 can head over to the new Windows Dev Center and access a range of resources designed to simplify their development efforts.
Case in point: ‘First look at Visual Studio 11 Express’ which is available via this link. The label of this Dev Center section is pretty self-explanatory, and those that already used the resources know that the focus is on building Metro apps.
Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview was released at BUILD in mid-September 2011 along with the Windows 8 Developer Preview Build 8102 Milestone 3 (M3).
Two versions of VS11 Preview were offered to testers, the Express SKU and the Ultimate edition. The software giant made it clear from the start that the Express flavor of Visual Studio 11 is focused on the Windows 8 Metro apps and platform.
“Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Express for Windows Developer Preview is a collection of tools that you can use to create, code, debug, localize, package, and deploy a Metro style app. In short, Visual Studio can help you do just about anything you need to do to develop a Metro style app,” the company explained.
“If you haven't used Microsoft Visual Studio before, you'll probably want to take a quick look around before you start writing code. Visual Studio has a lot of parts, but you don't need to know all about them to get started.”
‘First look at Visual Studio 11 Express’ provides comprehensive guidance on how to create a Metro app, including insight on how to write the code, but also on debugging and troubleshooting.
Metro apps are new to Windows 8, and come with the introduction of the Metro platform, which enables developers to use technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript in order to create projects for the operating system.
Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview is available for download here. Windows 8 Developer Preview Build 8102 Milestone 3 (M3) is available for download here.