To succeed with Windows Phone, it is not only essential to deliver a great consumer experience, but in my opinion, it is also essential to deliver a great developer experience as the SmartPhone race heats up.
On Thursday, Microsoft released final Windows Phone Developer Tools (WPDT), which enable developers to create beautiful Windows Phone 7 applications that take advantage of the phone’s new application platform, unique features and capabilities. I encourage all you developers out there to download the final tools. The WPDT package is a free single download containing all of the tools that developers need to create apps and games for Windows Phone 7: Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, the Windows Phone Emulator, Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone, and XNA Game Studio 4.0. For the hundreds of thousands of you who downloaded the beta tools (thank you!), the final tools will enable you to complete projects in preparation for the opening of Windows Phone Marketplace to app and game submissions in early October, as well as delivering several highly anticipated new features including; an update emulator based on RTM Windows Phone code, a panorama control, a pivot control and a Bing Map control.
In addition to updating the developer tools, the Windows Phone team also updated the training kit – you can learn more about the updates and download the training kit from the Windows Phone Developer blog.
This week, some of my colleagues demonstrated the richness of the the developer tools by unveiling forthcoming Windows Phone apps for Twitter, Flixster, Netflix, Travelocity and OpenTable, as well as phone’s ability to play YouTube content. These apps are great examples of how applications are taking advantage of Windows Phone 7 design elements and features. You can also see a wider selection of the types of creativity that the developer community is working on for Windows Phone 7 by visiting our YouTube channel.
Another exciting release yesterday was Microsoft Advertising’s new Mobile Advertising SDK for Windows Phone 7 and Microsoft Advertising Exchange for Mobile, the industry’s first real-time, bidded mobile ad exchange. Now you can monetize you apps even further by including advertising right into your app!
Happy coding!