Microsoft lets you turn any Xbox One console into a development kit

Amidst the plethora of announcements made on day one of Build 2016, Microsoft made a rather interesting one for Universal Windows Platform. The company showed off how convenient the Universal Windows Platform was and how it can help developers create universal apps across the Microsoft ecosystem. You can create games as well, but not for the Xbox, unless you’re a certified developer.

Say hello to the Xbox Dev Mode, that helps owners of a retail Xbox instantly turn their console into a development kit. The process is pretty simple. Users have to download the app and register for their console as a developer account (which is necessary for debugging their apps). The keyword here is apps. You can build games for Windows Mobile and Windows Store, but as ArsTechnica points out, you can’t build games for the Xbox One using this method just yet.

As of now, only the preview of the Xbox Dev Mode is available to interested developers. Getting out of the developer mode is easy as well, and all devs will need to do is hit ‘Exit’ to get back to their regular console experience.

(Also Read: Build 2016: Microsoft impresses developers – open source, open platform, bots and universality )

Microsoft also announced that Cortana will be making its way to the Xbox and that the Windows and Xbox stores will now finally be unified into one marketplace. Customers will no longer need to access two separate stores to download apps and this make better sense for purchases as well. Also announced was the new DirectX 12 graphics API that should help improve GPU performance by quite a large margin.