Guide to Developing Windows Store Applications in the Labs

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Introduction

In order to develop Windows Store applications, you need to use Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012. These are available to you in the labs, but there are a few steps you need to take in order to develop Windows Store applications in the labs. These are required because:

a) A Windows Developer license is required in order to develop Windows Store applications. In order to get one of these, you need to be running with Administrator privileges and, student accounts within your labs DO NOT have admin privileges.

b) Windows Store applications cannot be deployed from a network drive and, of course, your Student location/drive in the labs are generally a network drive.

Thanks to Wayne Rippin at Derby University who has developed the following guidance to overcome these restrictions and this blogs describes the steps you need to take.

Obtain a Microsoft Account

Before you do anything, you need to acquire a Microsoft Account. Some of you may already have one (it used to be known as a Live ID), but if not, you can easily acquire one from the following location:

https://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-live/sign-up-create-account-how

You can either use an existing email id or get a new one. You do not need to use your University email ID.

Please Note: All Students receive a FREE Developer account via DreamSpark see https://www.slideshare.net/lee_stott/free-windows-store-access-for-all-students-via-dreamspark for Visual Studio Developer activation a LIVE ID/Microsoft account is the only requirement

Obtaining a Windows Developer License in the Labs

The machine will need to be logged into as a local admin to enable/activate visual studio

The following PowerShell commands will remove the necessity of the local user having admin rights

Please create a folder within the local machines and create the following PowerShell commands.

Showdev.ps1:

Show-WindowsDeveloperLicenseRegistration

Getdev.ps1:

Get-WindowsDeveloperLicense

Unreg.ps1:

Unregister-WindowsDeveloperLicense

Requirements

Privilege Guard installed or a rights evaluation tool

User Instructions

Once you have logged in, go to the Windows Desktop and use Windows Explorer to navigate to the ( C:\Tools folder (or the folder your storing these scripts). This folder contains three scripts that perform various actions on Windows Developer licenses.

Right-click on the script called showdev. One of the options you will see is “Run with Privilege Guard”. Select this and a dialog box should be displayed asking you to accept the license terms for a Windows Developer license. Press the button to accept these terms.

If at this stage, the script terminates, just perform the above step again. For some reason, the first time this script is run, it just terminates when the license terms are accepted, rather than continuing.

You should now see a progress box appear and then you will be asked to enter your Microsoft Account ID (LIVEID) and password.  If this is accepted, you should then see a dialog box that tells you that you have successfully acquired a Windows Developer license. It will also tell you the date on which the license expires.

You can now start up Visual Studio 2012 and create a Windows Store application.

Building from a Network Drive

When you attempt to run a Windows Store application from Visual Studio, it actually deploys the application to the computer it is running on. Unfortunately, Windows Store applications cannot be deployed from a network drive. To solve this problem, you need to change the build target directory for your project so that it builds the application to a local drive:

  • If you are building a C# project, right-click on the project name in the Solution Explorer. This will bring up the properties tabs for the project. Select the Build tab. Go down to the Output Path and change this to ‘C:\temp’.
  • If you are building a C++project, right-click on the project name in the Solution Explorer. This will bring up the properties pages for the project. Under Configuration Properties, select General. Change the setting for Output Directory to ‘C:\temp’.

Now when your project is built, the output files will be placed in C:\temp. When you run your application, it will be deployed successfully.