In order to develop for Windows Phone 8, you will need to have Windows 8 running on your development machine. The first thing to do would be installing Windows 8 on your machine and then proceed with the rest of this section.

Once you have Windows 8 set up, you can begin installing the various pieces of software required to build for Windows Phone 8. You can choose either Visual Studio Express 2012 or Visual Studio Community 2013. They're both free and can be used in conjunction with the Windows Phone 8 SDK. My setup has Visual Studio Community 2013 and Windows Phone 8 SDK.

You can download your preferred version of Visual Studio from the following URL:

https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/downloads/download-visual-studio-vs.aspx

From the preceding link, you can choose to download an installer or an ISO. Either way, once you've downloaded and installed your preferred version of Visual Studio, download the Windows Phone 8 SDK from the following URL:

https://dev.windows.com/en-US/develop/download-phone-sdk

Once you've installed both Visual Studio and the Windows Phone SDK, double-click the cocos2d-wp8.vc2012 file from your Cocos2d-x source to open up the project in Visual Studio. Your Solution Explorer window should look something like this:

Now, right-click on the TestCpp project and select Set as StartUp Project. Next, select Emulator to run the project and voila!

Now that we've run the Cocos2d-x test bed, let's build one of our games in the next section.