This book presents a development of the game for the Windows Phone 8 platform. Thus, you need a set of tools that make it possible to create the game, test it, as well as run it on the emulator and the phone. Fortunately, the Windows Phone SDK 8.0, together with the Microsoft Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Phone as the Integrated Development Environment (IDE), should be sufficient at the beginning. A process of its installation is described in the first chapter of the book.

To use the IDE together with emulators, the computer has to run under the 64-bit Windows 8 operating system in Professional edition or greater, with the Hyper-V enabled. What is more, the processor has to support the hardware-assisted virtualization, the Second Level Address Translation (SLAT), as well as the hardware-based Data Execution Prevention (DEP). More details and other requirements are mentioned at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/ff626524.

It is assumed that you will create the developer account, as well as register the Windows Phone 8 device. Such steps are mandatory to test the software on a real phone and to publish the solution. If you do not have the developer account, you will not be able to run the application on the phone and to submit it to the Windows Phone Store. However, you can still develop it in the IDE and run it on the emulator.