The tools we need to write software

First of all, you will need Windows 10. The version you use does not matter if you have a device; however, when you want to use the emulator, you need to have the professional edition of Windows 10. The home edition does not support Hyper-V, the virtualization software that the emulator uses to run a virtual version of the HoloLens software.

Next, you need a development environment. This is Visual Studio 2015 Update 2 at least. You can use the free community edition, the most expensive and compete enterprise edition, or any version in between--the code will work just fine no matter what version you use.

When you install Visual Studio, make sure that you have the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) tools (at least version 1.3.1) and the Windows 10 SDK (at least version (10.0.10586) installed. If you want to use the emulator, and trust me, you do want this, you have to download that as well. Again, in this case, you need to have Hyper-V on your machine and have it enabled.