Xbox One Developer

As I’ve mentioned in my Build 2016 overview post, this year Microsoft announced they are finally opening the Xbox One for developers to deploy and debug their apps.
So I did a quick test and tried to deploy one of my apps on the Xbox as a quick experiment.

To get started you can read all about it on the official site but here is a quick summary of the most important things I found

1. Read the fine print before you activate developer mode. Some of the limitations are pretty rough so make sure you are aware of what you’re getting into: some games might not work anymore, you might need to reset your console to leave the developer mode and streaming to a Win 10 machine is not going to work anymore.
2. You do need a developer account to enable Developer Mode on your console. Within your developer account you can only activate 3 consoles. Once activated, multiple developers can pair to the console and deploy from their Visual Studio
3. When deploying from Visual Studio, ensure that the authentication mode is set to Universal. The error you get if the mode is incorrect is not the most obvious error so pay attention beforehand.
4. If by any chance your app is a WinJS app rather than a XAML/C# app, you will need to make some modifications to make it work out of the box. Check out the great TVHelpers library.

I’m really excited at the new possibilities that the Xbox opens and I am looking forward to publishing my first Xbox compatible app soon.