S. Somasegar is the corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft. Learn more about Somasegar.
11/29/2010 Update: Today we are announcing the final release of Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools. This release enables you to submit your VB applications to the Windows Phone Marketplace. Since the CTP, we’ve also added support for French, German, Italian, and Spanish.
Like the CTP, the final release requires Visual Studio Professional, Premium, or Ultimate, and the Windows Phone Developer Tools. If you don’t have Visual Studio 2010, you can install the free Visual Studio 2010 trial. You can also find VB code samples for Windows Phone on MSDN here.
Happy coding!
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Many of you have asked if Visual Basic can be used to write Windows Phone applications.
As of today, the answer is "yes!"
Starting today, you can download Microsoft Visual Basic CTP for Windows Phone Developer Tools. This is a great milestone as it enables our Visual Basic developers to be able to build applications for Windows Phone.
Applications built using the CTP run on both the emulator and the phone. To try the CTP, you'll need the final version of Windows Phone Developer Tools and Visual Studio 2010 Professional or higher. If you don't have Visual Studio 2010 Professional, you can install the free trial of Visual Studio Professional.
The CTP includes Visual Studio 2010 project templates, item templates, designer support, emulator support, debugging, and IntelliSense for Visual Basic. After installing the CTP, Visual Studio 2010 Professional and higher users will find Windows Phone project types for Visual Basic in the New Project Dialog, as you can see below.
Post your feedback and connect with others on the Windows Phone Forums, and report issues on Microsoft Connect.
Namaste!
What's so great about VB? Every time i have to read it my eyes hurt...
Get your eyes checked then mate...
Great news, thank you!
@Dominik: I feel the same when I have to read C#
Please, add Visual C++ for a future release...
So does this means that VB Express users are left out? That's sucks.
FarCry3r, you can use the free VS2010 Pro trial to use the CTP at no cost. There's a link in the text of the blog post.
Polita Paulus
Microsoft
Thank GOD , MS is still committed to VB
The only thing MS is committed to is their bottom line. They haven't released a "GOOD" development tool since Visual Studio 6.
Amen to not releasing a good dev tool brother ! When FoxPro for DOS was released we used to have to code @Say before there was a form builder. Microsoft has somehow managed to take coding all the way back to Early DOS programming standards now instead of writing @Say we are writing htmlhelper and developers are hailing this as a break through, give me a break. We should layout our forms and Visual Studio should generate the css, tables and divs for us. This product should be called Visual StoneAge. The sad part is it didn't take the FoxPro 8 years to get a form designer that works nor they require 2 different design patterns. The webform designer still can not render a web page correctly which is pathetic and MVC for the most part lacks one. Congratulations to the Visual Studio team for delivering such a wonderful product. What version of Visual Studio are you finally going to implement a class browser that does more then look good.
Instead of wasting $500 million for a WP7 campaign you should rather have added support for native code. With support for native code MS wouldn't need to steal icons from the Apple App Store.
www.zdnet.com/.../9917
But the good thing today is that we can just ignore MS with its 4% market share.
No apps, no market share. No market share, no apps. Spending an other $500 million on marketing won't fix this. Development tools will.
This to all the people who are stuck and frozen in history and refuse to move on: Get over it! Visual Studio 6 is history and worthless in current times. If you cannot, go build your memorials for it somewhere else. We are in 2010 and the tools that we need today cannot be understood by you if you refuse to learn and move on. Andre, the development tools for WP7 are world class and Apple has NOTHING close to this. Go and make Apple apps (if you can) and stop complaining in Microsoft blogs!
The dev tools may be "world class", but all Microsoft has to offer are proprietary languages and frameworks. I'm not going to rewrite the whole codebase for a smartphone with 4% marketshare. Angry Birds for Android got 1 million downloads witin the fist day while MS has to steal the Angry Birds icon from iTunes because they have no intention to rewrite it for WP7. MS is living in an ivory tower and the world outside is changing. C++/CLI would help here, but someone thought that spending $500 millions on marketing is better than support for C++ codebases. I don't mind the Silverlight UI, but I won't write any non-UI code in a proprietary language.
Also why is OpenGL not supported on WP7?
@Andre - C# is a first class citizen in the .NET World. C++ is unfortunately unpopular in developing business and consumer applications in general. The fact that the Windows Phone 7 is a business and consumer device and is ideal for .NET development with Silverlight - C# comes as a natural choice. C++ is way too complicated for business-oriented developers. OpenGL? Are you kidding me?!!
I think Microsoft got is spot on by choosing Silverlight and .net for Windows Phone development!
@Andre - Again, if you want to do open source development, go with Andriod. Why even bother with Win Phone 7? Surely you see some potential with Microsoft to be interested...
Microsoft's .NET platform is far superior and easier at the same time than open source alternatives like PHP, Python or even Java and is backed by solid development/design tools like Visual Studio and Expression.