C++ a little overkill for your next great Windows app? Check out AppStudio!

developer.com - Beginner’s Guide to Using AppStudio for Building Windows 8 Applications

Building applications isn’t easy, especially if you are not a developer and do not know how to. To help boost the number of apps on its ecosystem, Microsoft has provided a very way to build applications that can target Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1. In an earlier article (Speeding up Windows Phone Application Development Using App Studio) we saw how easy it was to create applications for Windows Phone 8 using AppStudio from Microsoft.

At Build 2014, Microsoft announced Universal apps (apps built once that can run on multiple Windows devices). At the same time, AppStudio updated their tools to support building Universal Apps, which can run on both Windows Phone 8.1 as well as Windows 8.1

In this article, we will explore how we can use AppStudio to easily build Windows 8.1 applications (which can also run on Windows Phone 8.1)

Hands On

To get started building applications using AppStudio, visit http://appstudio.windows.com/ and sign in.

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Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 packages

At this stage, we have a few choices.

1. Check out the application on our devices before we publish to the respective app stores.

a. For this, we will need to install certificates (which are linked under the prerequisites section).

b. Use the Installable packages to install the application on the device.

2. We can also publish the application directly to the app stores. If we want to do that, we will have to associate our application publishing profile with AppStudio.

3. We also can download the source code of the application, to add other features that are not provided by default.

As we can see, application developer for Microsoft’s new ecosystem isn’t very hard when we use AppStudio. Happy building.

Summary

In this article, we saw how easy it was to create applications for Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1. I hope you have found the information useful.

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If you're looking to build a quick "information" app and don't need uber-power or performance that a native framework like Marmalade would provide, Free is always better with Marmalade... Marmalade SDK 7.3 for Windows now has a free edition, then something like the AppStudio might be just what you are looking for...