The Windows 8 Consumer Preview just went live. According to Microsoft, this is a stable public preview, not a beta.
I’m still in the process of downloading it, but in a presentation, Microsoft claimed a large number of changes since the Windows 8 Developer Preview last years.
Oh, and all apps in the Windows Store will be free until Windows 8 is officially released in October.
Download Links
Visual Studio 11 Beta for Windows 8 Consumer Preview
XNA
I am happy to report that XNA Game Studio 4.0 Refresh is working just fine on Windows 8 Consumer Preview!
Here is my installation order:
- Visual Studio 11 (not required, but nothing bad happened from installing this before the older versions)
- Visual Studio 2010 Professional (either this)
- Visual C# 2010 Express (or this – I installed both ;))
- Microsoft Games for Windows Live (see How to work around a possible XNA Game Studio or Windows Phone SDK install failure on Windows 8 on Aaron Stebner’s blog)
- Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1
Everything works as usual and it was no problem installing it in parallel with Visual Studio 11