Is Visual Studio Required to Develop Win 8 Apps?

CalBear

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In reading the first chapter of "Metro Revealed: Building Windows 8 apps with HTML5 and JavaScript" the development described requires the use of Visual Studio. It sounds like this expensive Microsoft product will be required to develop apps for Windows 8. (Yes, there is a free trial version for now.) Is Visual Studio actually a requirement or will it be possible to easily develop Metro apps in other environments?
 

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Although in the past, the VS express versions were not to be used for compiling commercial applications (Free and person use apps only). The new Metro only version seems to allow you to post the results to the app store. So it appears that (and apparently MS has some brains after all) you can create commercial metro apps using the free version.

There may be some more "tiny print" somewhere that actually puts the spaghetti in that punchbowl, but you can see for yourself here:
Express | Microsoft Visual Studio 2012

Oh and as for "other" environments... I assume you mean free, while gcc+cygwin etc work ok for bog standard windows UI programming, I doubt that it'll be very useful for metro apps and app store requirements/submission for quite some time (if ever). :/ As long as VS studio express exists and is free (and I'm sure that'll be quite some time, they need apps BADLY) then that would be the way to go...
 

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