Developer tools are free from Microsoft. Tool kit includes Visual Studio Express 2012 and Expression Blend.

Must be running WIndows 8 on the desktop with Hyper-V to develop Windows Phone 8 applications however. Hyper-V is virtualization software and is required to run Windows Phone 8 desktop emulator.

Apparently client Hyper-V bundled for free in latest version of Windows 8 but it is not installed by default. Client Hyper-V is similar to stand-alone virtualization platforms such as VMware Workstation and VirtualBox. Client Hyper-V has stringent hardware requirements. Not every PC will be able to run it. You need a 64-bit processor that can support Second Level Address Translation (SLAT). You also need at least 4GB of RAM. If you’re in doubt about your PC, you can run a utility like Coreinfo to find out if SLAT is supported on your machine. Many notebook-edition CPUs do not support SLAT, but most desktop processors do. If you’re running the most recent generation of Intel or AMD processors, then you’re golden.

Please let me know your opinions about WP8 App development platform. Leave comments below.