You may have heard of Channel 9, Microsoft’s community site for developers? There are forums, videos and more to help developers, plus, a brand new series called 'Windows Phone 8 Development for Absolute Beginners'. There was an older series for Windows Phone 7, but this new series has been completely redone, specifically for Windows Phone 8.

Windows Phone Central reports:

Before we bake a cake, we need to make sure we have all the ingredients. In the case of app development, you’ll need some knowledge. Pre-requirements: You’ll need to be familiar with C# before you can completely jump into developing for Windows Phone 8. Not sure where to start for that? Channel 9 also has you covered with their C# Fundamentals video series.

Other than that, you’ll basically need to be on a machine that has Windows 8 installed. You’ll want the 64-bit version too since the Windows Phone Emulator runs on a virtual machine in Hyper-V. Having Windows 8 64-bit (either regular or Pro edition works) is what you’ll need to install the Windows Phone 8 SDK, the series will walk you through everything.

The video series on Channel 9 is presented was put together by Bob Tabor, Clint Rutkas, and Larry Lieberman. Although Bob will be doing most of the talking in the series. The series takes place over 35 parts and will take around 11 hours to complete. Which means you could power through in just one weekend.

Good stuff, and all free of course, though the requirement to already know C# well will put a lot of people off before they start. Not to mention owning a 64-bit Windows Phone 8 computer. If you'd like to code a basic application but don't fulfil both of these requirements then why not have a look at Microsoft's TouchDevelop system, updated recently, which (almost) requires no lines of code to be crafted at all?