Whilst the last two are not new to Windows Phone development, they can now be reached from within Visual Studio. This includes the Developer Power Tools, Developer Unlock and the Application Development tools. One of the other additions is under the Tools menu, where there is a Windows Phone 8.1 sub-menu. For example from the Project menu, Windows Phone developers now have the Store sub-menu with the ability to Create App Package.

One of the benefits Windows Phone development aligning with Windows app development is that more of the experiences along the development lifecycle will be similar. I want to take a different approach and talk about some of the additional tools that come with the SDK. I’m sure there will be a lot of blog posts talking about the new Universal project, the additional capabilities introduced in Windows Phone 8.1, Windows Phone XAML applications, the new application lifecycle model etc. Last week at BUILD, Microsoft announced the availability of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RC, which includes the new Windows Phone 8.1 SDK.

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