Testing native ARM compiling with Visual Studio 2012

Today, I had some brief spare time to try developing native Windows applications for the ARM platform. Native C++ development is supported on the platform, but I wanted to know if native Win32 desktop applications could be written for the platform – that is, if I could run my own Notepad.exe on a Windows RT tablet natively.

Turns out that while you can indeed create a new Win32 project with Visual Studio 2012, you cannot directly build your application when you set the target platform to be ARM. If you do this, you will receive a build error saying that the platform isn't supported.

Although Microsoft themselves most definitely use Visual Studio to build the native ARM applications, they probably use a customized version where such limitations have been lifted. I briefly read from the Internet that editing a certain MSBuild configuration file would allow you to build, but then running the created .exe file would fail, as there is no valid digital signature (from Microsoft).

This time, I ran out of time investigating the issue, but let me get back on this later.