We’re getting tantalizingly closer to the release of Windows Phone 7 and Microsoft has just unveiled some more developer tools in order to beef up the applications before Microsoft’ operating system hits the shelves.
According to Microsoft, The Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh includes:
* This release has been tested to work with the final release of Visual Studio 2010.
* An updated Windows Phone 7 OS image for the Windows Phone Emulator.
* A few APIs in the frameworks have been added and or changed. See this MSDN page for more details.
* The documentation has been updated with new and expanded topics. See this MSDN page for more details.
* We’ve provided limited support for launchers and choosers. In cases where the underlying built-in experience is not present launchers and choosers are still not available (i.e. the email chooser asks you to select a contact, but there are no contacts in the emulator and no way to add one).
* Pause/Resume events are now supported.
* If the tools are installed as the admin user, non-admin users are now able to deploy to the emulator.
* A problem with incremental deployment of projects has been fixed.
* A problem resulting in the error “Connection failed because of invalid command-line arguments” being displayed during project creation has been fixed.
* A problem where the Windows Phone node was not appearing in VS 2010 on non-system drives has been fixed.
* Design time skin refresh issues have been addressed.
So, the tools are getting much better and hopefully we’ll start seeing some more leaks about the WP7 hardware.
[Via the Windows Phone developer blog]