By Stephen Schenck

Microsoft made its big Windows Phone 8 announcement over a month ago, but developers who have been itching to get started crafting apps specifically for the new platform have so far been out of luck; Microsoft will obviously release the WP8 SDK at some point, but has yet to do so officially. As it turns out, though, it looks like someone jumped the gun a little bit, or made some files more accessible than they should have been, because the Windows Phone 8 SDK Release Preview has leaked out early, coming through Microsoft’s own servers.

With all the similarities between Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that the SDK is restricted to running on Windows 8 systems; devs will have to upgrade their PCs to the Windows 8 preview release if they want to take a peak at this SDK.

Just as we’d expect, the SDK includes extensive documentation on the new APIs present in Windows Phone 8. There are also some nice, broad overviews of the changes; for instance, the chart below highlights API extensions used exclusively by Windows Phone 8.

Click to enlarge

Those documents also include files informing devs how to track network usage with WP8 apps, as well as tips for maximizing battery life under the new OS.

We’ve yet to hear a response from Microsoft regarding this leak, but we can’t imagine it’s too pleased. Hopefully, this will spur the company on to make the SDK officially available to its developer community in the near future.

Source: WPXAP
Via: WMPoweruser