Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh and XNA Game Studio 4.0 CTP Refresh now available for download

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As announced on the Windows Phone Developer Blog, a Windows Phone Developer Tools (WPDT) CTP Refresh (which includes an XNA Game Studio 4.0 CTP Refresh as well) was released for download today.

Getting Started links

Here are links to help you get started installing and using the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh:

Breaking changes

Please make sure to look at the Breaking Changes section of the release notes – there are a few key issues there that you will need to keep in mind if you have projects created with the WPDT CTP, including the following:

  • Authenticode-signed assemblies included in the game project will cause the game to fail to deploy or load.  This issue and a workaround for it are covered in much more detail in this blog post.
  • XNA Game Studio Windows Phone games will now default to landscape mode instead of portrait mode, but unfortunately, landscape mode games do not display correctly in the emulator yet.  You will need to specify a 480x800 screen resolution if you don’t already.
  • Keyboard input is not working in the emulator in the CTP Refresh.  You cannot rely on keyboard input to control your game in the emulator in this release.

What’s new

The primary reason for the CTP Refresh is to support Windows Phone development in the final release of Visual Studio 2010 instead of in the VS 2010 RC.  For an overall list of what’s new in the CTP Refresh, I encourage you to take a look at the links in this blog post and this MSDN topic.

The CTP Refresh includes the following XNA Game Studio 4.0 changes:

  • APIs for scalars and orientation (although, unfortunately, this functionality still does not work correctly in the emulator – landscape mode games will not render correctly in the emulator in the CTP Refresh)
  • Support for incremental deployment of Windows Phone Game projects
  • A new Visual Studio property page that contains Reach/Hi-Def profile selection, a game thumbnail chooser and a game startup object chooser
  • Fixed some side-by-side issues with previous versions of XNA Game Studio.  After uninstalling the CTP Refresh, you will have to re-install the XNA Game Studio Platform Tools from %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft XNA\XNA Game Studio\v3.1\Setup\xnags_platform_tools.msi, but you should not need to do a full repair of previous versions of XNA Game Studio anymore
  • Added better error reporting for some Windows Phone deployment and debugging scenarios
  • Updated documentation

How to install

Here are steps you can use to install the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh

  1. If you have the original Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP installed, you will need to uninstall it first.  You can do that by going to the Programs and Features control panel and choosing to remove the item named Microsoft Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP – ENU.  This item will remove the other components that need to be removed.

  2. If you have the Visual Studio 2010 RC on your system, you will also need to uninstall that before you can install the WPDT CTP Refresh.

  3. (optional) If you plan to also use another VS 2010 edition (such as Professional, Ultimate, C# Express, etc) in addition to WPDT, you should install them before you install the WPDT CTP Refresh.  If you install them after the WPDT CTP, you will be prompted to download and install a Silverlight update when trying to use them.

  4. After removing the WPDT CTP and the VS 2010 RC (if you had it installed still) and installing other VS 2010 editions (if you choose to), you can proceed with installing the WPDT CTP Refresh.

If you encounter Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh setup failures

If you run into an installation or uninstallation failure for the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP, you can use the log collection tool to gather your setup log files.  This log collection tool will create a file named %temp%\vslogs.cab.

This tool does not gather XNA Game Studio 4.0 setup log files, so if your setup failure is caused by the XNA Game Studio 4.0 component, you’ll need to gather those logs separately by zipping up all of the logs in the folder named %temp%\XNA Game Studio 4.0 Setup\Logs.

Once you have gathered your setup log files, you can upload them to a file server of your choice (such as https://skydrive.live.com), and post a link to the log files in the forums to get additional support.

If you run into uninstallation issues with the WPDT CTP or the CTP Refresh, you can use the cleanup tool described at https://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/pages/9544320.aspx to remove XNA Game Studio or the Windows Phone Developer Tools.