Windows Phone Developer Tools Beta

The Beta of the Windows Phone 7 Developer tools has just been released. Many of the changes from the CTP we've been using seem to be geared to allowing those who have actual devices to use them. Unfortunately that doesn't include me.

Other changes include controls and control templates, both of which I've got no real understanding of yet, since that's all Silverlight and I'm still a Silverlight newbie, still focusing on learning some XNA.


The scary part about this, if you've read my previous posts on the matter, is that I have to uninstall the CTP versions of things and reinstall this version. Wish me luck!

VS2010 + Windows Phone 7 Redux

Err...yeah. That didn't go well at all. After multiple attempts, numerous installs and painstaking uninstalls, no love was found trying to get the Windows Phone 7 CTP to work with Visual Studio 2010 (not the RC, but the release). Granted, I've never seen anything specifically say that the CTP should work with a post-RC version, only RC, so perhaps it's my fault for high expectations. As it is, I'll wait until the Phone devkit is beyond CTP and released for proper inclusion into a full VS2010 -- and then try all over again.

Luckily, I've got an XP virtual machine in which I can run VS2010, for doing non-Phone development. It's just unfortunate that I can't combine all of my development work into a single environment.


On a related note, I finally got to play around with the Visual Studio 2010 Express that comes with the CTP -- I haven't touched Visual Studio for almost ten years, since I was employed as a developer, and even then I resisted embracing the environment (having come from many years of Emacs under *nix development). My C# programming of late has all been under Linux, using Emacs and Mono, but I'm forcing myself to use the correct environment for Phone development, and ... wow.

I *really* used to despise the Intellisense in Visual Studio, finding it an interfering and distracting nuisance -- it was the first thing I'd change in a new VS install, even before adding my emacs key bindings. But now ... yeah, wow. Because of the "live" nature of the environment, VS can deduce types of variables and provide completion in code that has never been compiled or run, and the method to accept provided completions is definitely more intuitive than it used to be.

This is also my first time doing anything with Silverlight, and thus my first experience using XAML. I'm quite impressed with how useable and interactive the XAML editor is and the immediate view of changes made - it sure beats hitting "compile" every minute to see how things are looking after each change.

I'm sure Visual Studio veterans are laughing at my wide-eyed experiences, but we can't all have experience with everything out there, can we? Well, I'm trying.