Microsoft is being praised for releasing a powerful software development kit for its new Windows 8 platform. But some developers are complaining of demanding system requirements.
The Windows 8 SDK offers some big improvements over the Windows Phone 7.5 developers tools. It supports a greater range of hardware and different types of processors, as well as things like near field communication radios, according to this ComputerWorld article.
It also has the functionality to create backward-compatible Windows Phone 7 applications, which may help keep the older platform alive. Many buyers of Windows phones (particularly newer Nokia devices) were worried that their devices would be effectively obsolete once Windows 8 was released.
However, as one software architect quoted in the article said, developers need Hyper-V to run the emulator in a virtual environment, as well as a 64-bit version of Windows 8 Pro, which has irked some of them.
Tad Anderson called the SDK "a flop because of the level of difficulty Microsoft has managed to add to getting it up and running for those of us running in a virtual environment."
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