Roll up, roll up, get your CTP here!

At the MIX keynote this morning, we announced the Windows Phone Developer Tool Community Technology Preview, which includes Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, XNA Game Studio 4.0, and the Windows Phone Emulator, and is available as a free download. Get it now and start making awesome phone games!

Notes for Game Studio developers:

• Although this CTP includes Game Studio 4.0 assemblies for Windows as well as Windows Phone, it only supports the Reach profile. If you try to create a HiDef game, you will get an error saying your hardware does not support HiDef capabilities. Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean your GPU sucks, just that we don’t support HiDef in the CTP.

• The CTP does not support deployment to Xbox 360.

• The automatic scaling and rotation feature is not included in the CTP, so for now you must always choose 480x800 portrait resolution. If you want to make a landscape game, or render at some other resolution, the best way is to draw your scene into a rendertarget, then rotate or scale while copying it to the screen using SpriteBatch. This is not the best approach for performance or battery life on actual phone hardware, but don’t worry, you can take out the rendertarget code out once we release final bits that support the image scaler.

Have fun!