Preparing our development environment

There's a fair chance you've got all the tools you need, and if you're already doing some Microsoft Azure development, you can probably skip most of this. If you want to look at phone development in, it's worth reading the Mobile development section.

Setting up software

Throughout this book, I will be using Visual Studio Professional 2013 as it allows me to work on various project types in one solution. Don't worry if you don't have a premium version such as Professional or Ultimate as you can use multiple versions of Visual Studio Express instead, which are as follows:

• Visual Studio Express 2013 for Web: You'll mostly need this, and when I talk about Visual Studio without being specific, this is the one to use if you're sticking to Express versions

• Visual Studio Express 2013 for Windows Desktop: If you want to build the WPF apps for the production management system and the Service Bus messaging simulator, you'll need this

• Visual Studio Express 2013 for...