If you are a developer and want to dip your toes into the world of development for Windows you have two choices.
Spend timing downloading and setting up the operating system and development related software, samples, etc. or you can use ready to go virtual machines (VMs) from the Windows developer support team.
Every couple of months Microsoft updates and makes available full evaluation Windows developer VMs over at the Windows Dev Center.
They make them available for users of Hyper-V, Parallels, VirtualBox and VMWare and this months updated VMs do not expire until 23 August 2016.
In each of these VMs you will find the following software setup from Microsoft:
- Windows 10 Enterprise Eval Version 1511 (Build 10586)
- Visual Studio 2015 Community Update 2
- Windows developer SDK and tools (Build 10586)
- Windows IoT Core SDK and Raspberry Pi 2 (Build 10586.151029-1700)
- Windows IoT Core project templates (Version 1.0)
- Microsoft Azure SDK for .NET (Build 2.9.1)
- Windows Bridge for iOS (Build 0.1.160525)
- Windows UWP samples (Build 3.0.0)
- Windows Bridge for iOS samples
As you can see the tools are all built to support the Windows 10 Current Branch release from last November which is the latest major update to the operating system. The VMs also contain plenty of samples to help you learn about bringing your iOS apps into the Universal Windows Platform (UWP), building UWP apps from scratch and even spending some time with the Internet of Things and Microsoft Azure.
You can access these VM downloads over on the Windows Dev Center and also get support from Microsoft as you try things out at https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/support.
By the way, these VMs are hefty downloads since they contain everything you need to get started:
- VMWare - 20.7GB
- Hyper-V - 19.1GB
- VirtualBox - 19.5GB
- Parallels - 19.6GB
But, wait...there's probably more so be sure to follow me on Twitter and Google+.
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