To develop applications for Windows 8, you need to obtain a developer license. This is not the same as the Windows Store registration that allows you to publish applications. You don’t pay for this license. This is just a token that lets you run applications on your own machine. This license expires every 30 days, so you need to renew it often.

As you develop your app, it pays to frequently run on lower-powered hardware. Develop on a full-powered PC, but deploy to a surface RT or other ARM device periodically to test. To do this, you need to renew your developer license on the RT device as well.

On your full development machine, Visual Studio will prompt you to renew your license when you open your project. But on an ARM device, you don’t have Visual Studio. To renew the license, you have to run the following PowerShell command as an administrator:

Show-WindowsDeveloperLicenseRegistration

This will display a login page where you enter your Microsoft ID credentials. You won’t be charged. You will just get a new license that is good for 30 days of development and testing.

Since you need to do this frequently, you’ll want to create a shortcut that you can launch from the start screen. Here’s how you do that.

Create a PowerShell script

Create a folder called c:\Scripts. Create a text file in that folder called “DeveloperLicense.ps1”. Add the command above to the text file. You can do this by running the following from the command line:

mkdir c:\Scripts
echo Show-WindowsDeveloperLicenseRegistration > c:\Scripts\DeveloperLicense.ps1

Create a shortcut

Then create a shortcut in that same folder. You do that by right-clicking and selecting “New”, “Shortcut”. Set the target to the following:

%SystemRoot%\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe c:\Scripts\DeveloperLicense.ps1

Name this shortcut “Renew Developer License”. Right-click the new shortcut, edit the properties, click Advanced, and set it to run as administrator.

Set the execution policy

Finally, before you can run this license for the first time, you need to set the execution policy. Open a PowerShell command prompt as an administrator. To do this, pull up the start screen, type “PowerShell”, right-click “Windows PowerShell”, and click “Run as administrator”. Then run this command:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

I should warn you that this opens your machine to running untrusted PowerShell scripts. Find out more about this setting at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=135170. Don’t do this lightly.

Finally, you can right-click on this shortcut and pin it to the start screen. Now you can easily tap the tile and login to renew your free Windows developer license.