As announced on the Windows Phone Developer Blog and on the App Hub web site, the final version of the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 (formerly named the Windows Phone Developer Tools, and which includes the XNA Game Studio 4.0 Refresh as well) was released for download today.

Getting Started links

Here are links to help you get started installing and using the English version of the Windows Phone SDK 7.1:

• Windows Phone SDK 7.1 web download bootstrapper (English – en-US)
• Windows Phone SDK 7.1 full download ISO image (English – en-US)
• Windows Phone SDK 7.1 release notes

Here are download links for non-English versions of the Windows Phone SDK 7.1:

• Windows Phone SDK 7.1 web download bootstrapper (French – fr-FR)
• Windows Phone SDK 7.1 full download ISO image (French – fr-FR)
• Windows Phone SDK 7.1 web download bootstrapper (German – de-DE)
• Windows Phone SDK 7.1 full download ISO image (German – de-DE)
• Windows Phone SDK 7.1 web download bootstrapper (Italian – it-IT)
• Windows Phone SDK 7.1 full download ISO image (Italian – it-IT)
• Windows Phone SDK 7.1 web download bootstrapper (Japanese – ja-JP)
• Windows Phone SDK 7.1 full download ISO image (Japanese – ja-JP)
• Windows Phone SDK 7.1 web download bootstrapper (Korean – ko-KR)
• Windows Phone SDK 7.1 full download ISO image (Korean – ko-KR)
• Windows Phone SDK 7.1 web download bootstrapper (Russian – ru-RU)
• Windows Phone SDK 7.1 full download ISO image (Russian – ru-RU)
• Windows Phone SDK 7.1 web download bootstrapper (Spanish – es-ES)
• Windows Phone SDK 7.1 full download ISO image (Spanish – es-ES)
• Windows Phone SDK 7.1 web download bootstrapper (Chinese (Traditional) – zh-TW)
• Windows Phone SDK 7.1 full download ISO image (Chinese (Traditional) – zh-TW)

Documentation links

Here are some links to documentation to help you get started using the Windows Phone SDK 7.1:

• What’s new in the Windows Phone SDK 7.1
• Windows Phone developer documentation home
• XNA Game Studio 4.0 Refresh developer documentation home
• Windows Phone OS 7.1 code samples
• App Hub getting started page
• App Hub game developer education home

Support links

Here are some links if you run into questions or issues with the Windows Phone SDK 7.1:

• App Hub forums
• Connect site for reporting Windows Phone SDK bugs and suggestions
• Connect site for reporting Expression Blend bugs and suggestions
• Connect site for reporting XNA Game Studio bugs and suggestions

How to install

Here are steps you can use to install the Windows Phone SDK 7.1:

1. If you have any Visual Studio 2010 editions (such as Professional, Ultimate, C# Express, etc) installed on your computer, you will need to install Visual Studio 2010 SP1 first.
2. If you have the WPDT 7.1 Beta, the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 Beta 2 or the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 RC installed, you must uninstall it before installing the Windows Phone SDK 7.1. To uninstall it, you can go to the Programs and Features control panel and uninstall the item named Windows Phone SDK 7.1 (RC) - ENU and that will automatically uninstall all of the beta components that you need to remove before proceeding to install the Windows Phone SDK 7.1.
   
   Note: If you have the original Windows Phone 7 version of WPDT and/or XNA Game Studio 4.0 installed, you do not need to uninstall them. The Windows Phone SDK 7.1 and the XNA Game Studio 4.0 Refresh will automatically uninstall the previous version for you behind the scenes. You only need to uninstall previous 7.1 beta builds.
   
   
3. After updating any existing editions of VS 2010 to SP1 and uninstalling any previous beta versions of the Windows Phone SDK that you previously installed, you can proceed with installing the Windows Phone SDK 7.1.

If you encounter Windows Phone SDK 7.1 setup failures

If you run into an installation or uninstallation failure for the Windows Phone SDK 7.1, you can use the log collection tool to gather your setup log files. This log collection tool will create a file named %temp%\vslogs.cab.

Once you have gathered your setup log files, you can upload them to a file server of your choice (such as http://skydrive.live.com), and post a link to the log files in the forums to get additional support.

If you run into uninstallation issues with any release of the Windows Phone SDK or XNA Game Studio, you can use the cleanup tool described at http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/pages/9544320.aspx to remove the Windows Phone SDK or XNA Game Studio.

As announced on the Building Windows 8 blog and on Jason Zander’s blog among other places, a developer preview of Windows 8 is available for download.  One of the download options for the Windows 8 Developer Preview includes a pre-installed version of the developer tools, including Visual Studio 11 and .NET Framework 4.5 developer preview.

Here are some links to help you get started downloading and using the Windows 8 Developer Preview and the associated developer tools:

• Windows Developer Center - http://dev.windows.com/
• Visual Studio 11 developer preview - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/hh127353
• .NET Framework 4.5 developer preview - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/hh403373

Rob Mensching posted some additional information on his blog about setup features in Visual Studio 11.  There are a couple of key points that he mentioned in his post that I want to highlight here as well:

• Visual Studio 11 setup is being built with the WiX 3.6 toolset and the Burn chainer.  This point is a little bittersweet for me personally.  One one hand, I have been really happy to see the Burn chainer technology grow into something that can support the relatively complex chaining scenarios needed by Visual Studio setup.  On the other hand, the previous Visual Studio setup chainer is one of the first things I worked on when I started at Microsoft back in 1999, and it was used to install all versions of Visual Studio from 2002 to 2010 as well as the .NET Framework 3.0 and 3.5.  It feels a little bit like the end of an era for me to finally see that chainer get retired.
  
  
• Setup is integrated more tightly and earlier on in the developer work flow for Metro-style applications for Windows 8 than it has been in previous Windows development paradigms.  I feel pretty strongly that product development as a whole is most effective when setup is integrated into the product development lifecycle instead of being an afterthought.  Rob previously referred to this concept as setup-driven development, and I’m happy to see it become a more established practice in Windows 8.

Question:

I recently received a .NET Framework update from Windows Update.  It installed successfully, but Windows Update continues to offer this update to my computer afterwards.  How can I get Windows Update to detect that this update is correctly installed on my computer?

Answer:

In some cases, Windows Update can get confused and think that it needs to continue to offer an update to a computer even after it has been successfully installed.  In this type of scenario, it can sometimes help to reboot your computer and then use the steps listed at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971058 to reset the Windows Update components on your computer.

If Windows Update continues to offer an update to your computer even after resetting Windows Update components, then you might need to uninstall and re-install the product that the update applies to in order to cause Windows Update to correctly detect the installation state of the update.