On Thursday 16th September (Friday 17th for me) Microsoft released the final version of the initial release of the Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools, 2 weeks after the Windows Phone 7 RTM'd and went to phone manufacturers to build some nice new Windows Phones for us. These Developer Tools are free and are available for anyone to download and use some of the best development environments to build Windows Phone 7 applications with ease. I downloaded these when they were released and thought I'd show them to you. This article will stay fairly short as these tools are only aimed at people who wish to write apps for the phone, not for people who just want to buy and use one.
The Windows Phone Developer Tools use 2 Microsoft development environments to allow developers to build applications for the Phone. For an environment aimed at coding and making the application functional, Microsoft Visual Studio is used. For those who already have Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional installed, the Windows Phone Developer Tools are simply added as an additional project type in the New Project dialog or for those who cannot afford or simply do not have Microsoft Visual Studio Professional, a free standalone Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone version is supplied for free which just includes the Windows Phone projects. In Visual Studio you can build either standard apps as Silverlight for Windows Phone projects in XAML for the design of each control and the C# language for the actions each control performs (although Visual Basic support is coming soon and is already at CTP stage) or you can build games for the Windows Phone using the XNA project type (XNA is what Xbox developers use to create their games, so it's powerful stuff).
Silverlight Projects in Visual Studio 2010
XNA Projects Available In Visual Studio 2010 (Only Windows Phone Ones Appear In The Express Edition)
Silverlight Development Environment In Visual Studio 2010
XNA Development Environment In Visual Studio 2010
For an environment designed at making the Silverlight projects look good then Microsoft uses Expression Blend. As with Visual Studio, for those who have already purchased Expression Blend 4 for other uses, then the Windows Phone project types are added into the New Project Dialog, but for those who don't have Expression Blend, then Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone is supplied which only contains the Windows Phone projects. Here you can take your functional coded apps that you built in Visual Studio and add graphics and turn them into professional looking apps ready for deployment. Expression Blend also allows you to edit the code, so there's no need to go back to Visual Studio to make code edits.
Silverlight Development Environment In Expression Blend 4
The final part of these developer tools is the emulator. This runs a restricted version of the Windows Phone 7 OS that allows the user to run Internet Explorer and the application that they're debugging and change a few basic settings but that's it. If you're curious, there are hacked emulator images that you can download and play with, but if you're developing then it is best you stick with this image as it is guaranteed to work properly.
Windows Phone Emulator
So that's the Windows Phone Developer Tools for now. They will be updated over time as the phone is updated and has more functionality. The next big update to the tools I suspect will be the addition of Visual Basic support and probably multitasking when that eventually comes to Windows Phone 7 in the future! Apple are working hard to match the high benchmark that Microsoft has set with these developer tools in terms of ease of use and functionality, but I personally don't think they'll ever catch up to a tool that allows you to write code in Visual Basic.
