14 DAY TRIAL // Redmond-based software giant Microsoft announced back in February that it planned on making available at the MIX10 conference a wide range of details and tools for the development of Windows Phone 7, and the first batch of them were unveiled on Monday, during the first day of the event. The new tools are being released only a week after the release of other development solutions, aimed mainly at the building of games for handsets powered by the new OS, among which we can count the XNA Game Studio 4.0 toolset.
According to ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley, among the newly unveiled tools we can count: “Expression Blend for Windows Phone, a Windows Phone 7 add-in for Visual Studio 2010, a standalone Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, and a Windows Phone 7 Emulator for application testing.” At the same time, the company also delivered an almost final Release Candidate of Silverlight 4, and announced that the final version of the software solution was expected to become available at the end of the next month.
Along with the delivery of Silverlight 4 Release Candidate (RC), Microsoft also unveiled the fact that the first Windows Phone 7 devices would not use Silverlight 4, but that there would be a superset of Silverlight 3 with support for Windows Phone 7 specific features. The Redmond company also demonstrated Expression Blend for Windows Phone, and made available a Community Technology Preview (CTP) for Expression Blend 4 for the platform. The solution should deliver the same development workflow as available before for Silverlight and .Net applications.
Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone should offer the same developer environment (IDE) for the design and testing of applications for the platform. Developers will also receive the necessary tools to get started with Silverlight and XNA Game Studio programming, as well as to optimize existing applications for the handsets, not to mention that they can also set the applications to connect to Azure services. “Visual Studio 2010 can be installed side-by-side with Visual Studio 2008 SP1. For Silverlight 4 development, you will need the latest version of Visual Studio 2010,” Microsoft also notes.
Mary Jo also notes that, “during the Mix 10 keynote, it was clear that Microsoft is doing its best to distance itself from being known as an enterprise phone developer. Company officials didn’t demonstrate a single enterprise app - other than Outlook - during the kick-off Mix keynote. (I did see a quick preview of the Office Hub for Windows Phone 7 during one of the breakouts, with promises that Microsoft will be providing more details about Office on the new phone platform in June). Microsoft is targeting Windows Phone 7 devices at 'life maximizers,' company officials said, meaning users who want to use their mobile devices for both work and play.”