Yee-Hah, I’ve been asked this questions a number of times of late, now it’s official, Visual Basic.NET development comes to Windows Phone 7, head over to Visual Basic CTP for Windows Phone Developer Tools to download and be sure to check out Brandon Watsons posting.  Provided in this download are all the templates, designer support, emulator (and phone!) support and IntelliSense for Visual Basic.

This CTP is a great first step and enables thousands of Visual Basic developers to use existing skills to build exciting new apps alongside C# developers.  Not only will this make it easier for VB developers to get started, but potentially enables reuse of existing source code and frameworks to reduce the cost and time of development.

Now this is a CTP (Community Technical Preview), it doesn’t ship with a “Go Live” license and is meant for evaluation and feedback.  No production quality or released applications should be built using the CTP. 

With this CTP you can build Silverlight apps, but for now no support for XNA or Blend.  We are not announcing timelines just yet but keep an eye on the Windows Phone Developer Blog for further information.

The CTP needs to be installed on a machine which has both Visual Studio 2010 Professional or higher, as well as the final version of Windows Phone Developer Tools which are available from http://developer.windowsphone.com.  If you don’t have Visual Studio 2010 then you can download a 90 day trial version from here

 

image

Resources

No matter what language you develop in, getting the User Experience right is critical, so check out

  1. Windows Phone 7 Design Resources – UI Guide and Design Templates
  2. Start here, understand the Windows Phone 7 Experience Windows Phone Design Day Recordings

We will be making more resources available in Visual Basic soon but for now please use these C# Resources

  1. MSDN Library for Windows Phone development, including code samples, getting started topics, and reference documentation.
  2. There is also a great series of sessions in the Windows Phone 7 Jump Start.
  3. You may also be interested to use the Windows Phone 7 Training Kit for Developers, as well as various books being developed on the topic.
  4. Watch for content updates on the Visual Basic Developer Center.

Cheers Dave