Windows Phone Developer Tools + XNA Game Studio 4.0 Available Now!
*Surprise*
At the MIX ‘10 Keynote Scott Guthrie announced that you’ll be able to immediately download the Windows Phone Developer Tools at http://developer.windowsphone.com. In the Windows Phone Developer Tools Preview you’ll find:
- Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone
- Windows Phone 7 Series Add-in for Visual Studio, for developers already working with Visual Studio 2010 RC1.
- Windows Phone 7 Series emulator.
- XNA Game Studio 4.0
Additionally Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone is available as a separate download, and you can check out Christian Schormann’s post about it.
By the way, all of these great tools are absolutely free which means today you can get started developing your games on Windows, and Windows Phone 7 Series whether you use XNA Game Studio or Silverlight. You’ll find several great stuff covered in the release notes for the product but wanted to call out one important reminder:
If you’re familiar with XNA Game Studio betas or previews, you’ll know that while we include the Xbox 360 project types, you will not be able to Deploy or Debug XNA Game Studio 4.0 project using XNA Game Studio Connect at this time.
We’ve actually spent much of our focus on this preview release on the Windows and Windows Phone projects, so I would personally stick to those and think about moving to Xbox 360 at a later time.
Don’t forget we’re here to answer questions on http://developer.windowsphone.com and http://forums.xna.com. I hope you enjoy this first look at the Windows Phone Developer Tools!
More to come as we continue with MIX ‘10!
Can`t wait to get started with Windows Phone Development with XNA…
Windows Phone 7 rocks. The dev tools look great and the future looks bright BUT….
Why no support for Visual Basic?
All I can really speak to is XNA Game Studio in this case, we've been primarily focused on C#, our long term goal is to support all the .NET languages but in this released we really focused on supporting the new platform first.
Impressive set of tools. Will present a way to deploy easily the apps to share? <GEEK FICTION>Now that the cards are on the table and seem that the zune (sexiest hardware ever) platform will never have a dedicated 3rd party applications marketplace why don't release in parallel with the official updates an 'hacker firmware' and all the api to access the UI Framework and the web? That would really taste like honey for new developers and would not crash any Microsoft plan…</GEEK FICTION>
We will have a story for deploying content to your device for development, however everything that consumers use or that you are sharing will be through Windows Phone Marketplace.
BTW I apprecate the suggestion too!