It’s been just one week since we went final with the Windows Phone Developer Tools. The uptake has been incredibly strong, and we have been so excited to hear how happy developers were with the additions of the Panorama, Pivot and Bing Maps controls. Well, that’s last week’s news.
I asked this question yesterday as a little bit of a tease for what we are announcing today. Ever since we first announced the application platform for WP7, there was a loud chorus of Visual Basic developers asking if and when they would be able to build apps for Windows Phone. That wait is over. You can now download the Visual Basic CTP for Windows Phone Developer Tools. Provided in this download are all the templates, designer support, emulator (and phone!) support and IntelliSense for Visual Basic.
We’re not formally announcing the schedule for when Visual Basic will be fully supported. We’re giving VB developers early access to the Windows Phone 7 platform so that they can start thinking about what amazing apps they want to build.
A couple of important caveats:
- This is a CTP, which means we want to give you early access, and are hoping to solicit feedback, but this is not a final implementation, and you should not expect anything you built to be commercial ready.
- There is no Go-Live license, which means you shouldn’t try to release apps built with this version of the technology.
- You need to be a Visual Studio 2010 Professional (or higher) customer. So if you only have the Express edition of the Windows Phone Developer Tools, you cannot use this version of the CTP. I hear Visual Studio 2010 have a trial download if you are really itchy.
- You cannot build XNA games. Silverlight apps only.