Microsoft is betting big on the success of Windows Phone 8, the company's great hope for making an overdue dent in a mobile market dominated by Apple and Google. In order for that bet to pay off, though, the company knows it needs to win over the developer community, so packing the new SDK with useful tools -- both for developing and -- is a must.
provides a standalone IDE (integrated development environment), using the Visual Studio Express 2012 edition, for developers to build windows Phone 8 applications. It also provides an add-in to the Visual Studio 2012 Professional, Premium, or Ultimate editions.
on the MSDN site.
On the testing side, Microsoft has added app-monitoring capabilities to Windows Phone Application Analysis (formerly Windows Phone Performance Analysis). The feature enables developers to captures key app metrics relevant from a quality perspective, such as startup time, response time, battery drain, and network latency; it then rates the app based on the metrics. The idea here is to help developers ensure the quality and performance of their apps as during the building process, rather than waiting until after the fact.