For Developers: Windows Phone 7.8 SDK now available

For Developers: Windows Phone 7.8 SDK now available

January 22, 2013 | By Surur

Microsoft has announced the availability of the SDK for Windows Phone 7.8, which includes two emulator images for the OS.

The emulator  will allow developers to fully test how their Windows Phone 7.5 apps behave in 7.8.

The Windows Phone SDK update adds:

• Windows Phone 7.8 emulator: This OS image emulates your app running on a 512-MB device running Windows Phone 7.8 (build 8878)
• Windows Phone 7.8 256MB emulator: This OS image emulates Windows Phone 7.8 (build 8878) running on a 256-MB device
• If you’re running a Windows Phone SDK 7.1 installation, the update will also download and install the Windows Phone SDK 7.1.1 update onto your machine as part of the update
  (again, only applicable to Windows Phone SDK 7.1 installations)

The SDK update requires an existing installation of the Windows Phone SDK for Windows Phone SDK 7.1 (7.1 or 7.1.1) or Windows Phone SDK 8.0.

Windows Phone 7.8 offers no new APIs, but does allow developers to take advantage of new live tile options, such as:

• And app’s primary tile can have a customized small tile, support wide tiles, and also take advantage of the Flip tile template.
• Secondary tiles can be enabled to take advantage of all three of the new tile templates (Flip, Iconic, and Cycle).