[miguelrochefort]

Professional Windows Phone developer here.

Here are the tools/processes usually used in WP8 app development:

IDE: Visual Studio Language: C# or F# UI: XAML (WPF) and Visual Designer Deployment: Windows Phone simulator (really good) or Device Architecture: MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) with Two-Binding

If you do it right, you should be able to reuse 80-90% of the code in a Windows 8 app. With Xamarin, you can reuse 50-75% of the code on iOS and Android (depends if the app is UI-heavy or not).

I worked with native iOS (Xcode and Objective-C), native Android (Eclipse/Android Studio and Java), and Windows Phone. Microsoft has, by far, the best tools which makes building a Windows Phone app quicker than doing the same on any of the other two platforms. iOS is the second-best, and Android is the worst. Xamarin makes things a little better.

[Jaberer]

Thanks for your comment! Yup, I used VS2012 in C# and XAML

Definitely got a lot of feedback from my friends to get it on iOS and Android. Haha, and yeah, Android Studio is quite the hassle compared to Visual Studio, but will definitely get through it :)

[bithush]

Thank you for such a detailed reply!