Watch the video of a BUILD session to see what you need

Sep 22, 2011 11:21 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft promised that metro would be much more than just about the UI in Windows 8, and at BUILD last week, the Redmond company certainly delivered on that promise.

Essentially, Metro is a new development platform included in the next iteration of Windows, designed to support next generation, immersive applications that have been dubbed Metro apps.

Various members of the Windows team discussed Metro in detail at the company’s Windows 8-centric conference in Anaheim, and I just wanted to point out two excellent sessions for the developers that were unable to attend BUILD.

At the bottom of this article you will be able to find embedded the videos for “Platform for Metro style apps” and “Tools for building Metro style apps.”

Devs looking to start building Metro apps for Windows 8 might as well start off by watching the two videos below.

They’ll be able to hear Ales Holecek, distinguished engineer, and John Sheehan, architect, as well as Kieran Mockford, architect, and Chris Sells, program manager.

In addition to watching the two sessions here, users can also head over to Channel9 and download the videos in a variety of file formats (here and here).

The Windows Developer Preview with developer tools English, 64-bit (x64) ISO image is perhaps the best download of Windows 8 Build 8102 Milestone 3 (M3) that Microsoft is offering to developers so that they can start building Metro Apps immediately.

This particular Windows 8 pre-Beta release comes with Windows SDK for Metro style apps, Visual Studio 11 Express for Windows Developer Preview, Expression Blend 5 Developer Preview and 28 Metro apps.

Just as a reminder, existing .NET developers can continue leveraging XAML, C#, and Visual Basic in order to create Windows programs, including Metro applications. But at the same time, Microsoft has opened up Windows 8 to web developers, which are free to take advantage of technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript.

Windows 8 Developer Preview Build 8102 Milestone 3 (M3) is available for download here. (Windows Developer Preview with developer tools English, 64-bit (x64), Windows Developer Preview English, 64-bit (x64) or Windows Developer Preview English, 32-bit (x86))

Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview is available for download here. .NET Framework 4.5 Developer Preview is available for download here.