Yesterday, Mango: today, Windows Phone SDK RTW

The Mango blog post on the Windows Phone blog hinted as much, but a new blog post on the Windows Phone Developer blog makes it official:

I’m pleased to announce that the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 RTW release is now available on the Microsoft Download Center for immediate download and update.

The RTW release features seven new languages, and is now available in 9 languages (English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, and Traditional Chinese).

Originally launched as a beta at Mix11 last March, the Windows Phone Developer tools have added a number of new features since then, many in direct response to user feedback:

  1. With MIX11, we launched the WPDev Feedback site on the UserVoice platform as a place for developers to post suggestions and capability requests; yesterday, we reskinned the site to use the new Windows Phone chrome, and we will start providing more feedback on submitted suggestions starting next month. If you haven’t already, head over there and file your suggestions and feedback for future releases!
  2. With the Beta 2, we provided developers with a program to get a pre-release ‘Mango’ update on their retail phones. This has enabled our developer base to build and test their apps in time for Windows Phone 7.5 consumer release (yesterday!).
  3. The tools are more widely available: 4 additional languages supported in WPSDK 7.1, and now also available for install via the Web Platform Installer (WebPI)
  4. The tools now include some great new capabilities:
    • NuGet allows you to easily keep your plug-ins and code library packages up to date
    • The profiler just plain kicks – who doesn’t love being able to see where performance bottlenecks are occurring in their apps?
    • Time to market for apps has been significantly decreased and first pass rates increased with the inclusion of the Marketplace Test Kit
    • The emulator supports the ability to feed in location and accelerometer data, as well the ability to take screenshots
    • The Microsoft Advertising Ad Control is now included as part of the WPSDK installation (and now available in 11 countries outside the US)
  5. The underlying developer platform includes a massive number of API changes and capabilities that developers have been asking for (background agents; fast app switching; Silverlight 4; XNA/Silverlight Interop; what is there not to love here?)

You can download and install the WPSDK 7,1 tools from the Microsoft Download Center.



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