Wednesday 22 September 2010

Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools final version released

Hi folks,

Microsoft released the final version of the development tools for Windows Phone 7 last week. The tools are free and consist of the products:
  • Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone
  • Expression Blend for Windows Phone
  • XNA Game Studio for Windows Phone 7
  • Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio
  • Windows Phone Emulator

You can download the web installer here; the .iso image can be found here. The tools will only intall on Windows Vista and Windows 7. Microsoft will open the Windows Phone Marketplace at the beginning of October.


The current release of the Windows Phone 7 development tools is only available in English but Microsoft promises the release of the French, Italian, German and Spanish language versions in the near future.

As of now the application business logic has to be written in C# for both Silverlight and XNA. Visual Basic.NET support was announced to be released later this year.

The improvements over the beta version include new templates for pivot and panorama, improved debugging functionalities as well as French, Italian, Spanish, German and English support for the Windows Phone Emulator.

You can find the official release announcement on the Windows-Phone Blog. Further information and tutorials can be found on Scott Guthries Blog.

In addition you can download the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit, which provides you with additional controls, from CodePlex.

Have fun!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It is always a problem when Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools shipped independently of VS2010. One should update this tools constantly. Why not to include in standard windows update?