The Blend team is excited to announce our latest release of Blend and Visual Studio XAML design tools that support Windows Phone 8 development. In this release, our big focus was on unifying the XAML design support across Blend and Visual Studio, similar to the design experience available for other XAML platforms like Windows Store Apps, WPF, and Silverlight.
Blend is included with Visual Studio 2012. This makes it easy for you to create great Windows Phone 8 applications. The free Visual Studio 2012 Express for Windows Phone 8 comes with Blend as well. For all you Visual Studio 2012 Pro, Premium, and Ultimate customers out there, installing the Windows Phone 8 SDK automatically enables Windows Phone 8 development in your installed version of Blend and Visual Studio.
A lot of the Blend features you have come to love in the previous edition of Windows Phone tools are now available in Visual Studio as well, including the Device Panel, better support for editing controls like the AppBar, and template editing.
In addition to these, we have added support for designing for multiple resolutions in the Device Panel.
All the features of Blend available in the previous edition of the Windows Phone tools are carried over to the Windows Phone 8 tools as well, including Behaviors, visual state editing, and sample data. If you have the Windows Phone 8 SDK installed, you also get full design support for building Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) apps in Blend and Visual Studio.
Blend for Visual Studio 2012
Visual Studio 2012
Check out the video below to see our flagship features in play in Visual Studio & Blend.
For more information on Windows Phone 8 App Development, please visit the Windows Phone Dev Center.