First impressions Windows Phone Developer Tools beta

I just installed the beta bits released this evening and as per the CTP the install experience is brilliant. Except with the beta the greatest thing is support for Visual Studio RTM. So unlike the CTP, even if you had VS RTM installed, then you installed the WP7 dev tools, the installer would install the CTP of VS express and not integrate with VS RTM. Actually I found a whole bunch of errors when attempting this with the CTP.

New project in VS 2010 RTM (no support for VB.NET though):

However this build is good. I'm running VS 2010 Ultimate and VS 2008 Team Suite and this build integrated with VS 2010 RTM nicely.

It is also worth noting in this release of WP7 dev tools, you get Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone beta. In the CTP you had to download this separately.

So experience so far is great, well done Windows Phone 7 team.

Emulator running bing:

I'll post my experiences of actually writing WP7 code using these bits in later posts. In the mean time you can download and try for yourself.