Windows Phone App Studio Now Supports Windows 8.1 too!

App Studio is a really cool online application that Microsoft launched last August to make it easy for developers – or anyone, really – to create data-driven Windows Phone apps without writing any code. The whole experience is driven from within a web browser and anyone can build an app – no programming skills required. Of course, if you’re a developer you can download the source code generated by App Studio and use that codebase as a starting point for your own custom apps. FYI, the code generation is a one-way street, i.e. you cannot customize the code in Visual Studio and then do a round-trip back to App Studio for more customizations.

I actually published my own Windows Phone app based on App Studio called Watch Corner Gas last October, but I had to take it down since the third-party YouTube channel I was using was closed (you can see a live video I recorded here). App Studio has been a very popular tool. Microsoft reports that over 300,000 App Studio projects have been created to date, and more than 20,000 apps have been published in the Windows Phone Store. I can always feel the excitement of attendees every time I demonstrate it at events. My youngest attendee to date was even featured in a recent Nokia Conversations blog post where this really sharp 8-year-old kid attended my App Studio session at Dvlup Day Boston. He created his first app while attending my talk, and was a published developer within a week. What’s your excuse?

New Version

Today Microsoft announced a new major version of App Studio. First, we have a new url to access App Studio: https://appstudio.windowsphone.com.

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