Microsoft Visual Basic CTP for Windows Phone Developer Tools Tutorial

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Today we announced availability of the Microsoft Visual Basic CTP for Windows Phone Developer Tools. Details of the announcement can be found on Soma's blog.

This CTP installs on top of the final Windows Phone Developer Tools announced last week and enables you to write Windows Phone 7 apps in Visual Basic. Installation steps for this CTP are:

Let's walk through an example:

Open Visual Studio and create a new project by choosing File, New Project. All the C# Windows Phone 7 app templates are available for Visual Basic, including the new Panorama and Pivot applications.

 

 Selecting the Panorama application above creates a Visual Basic app that uses the Panorama UI metaphor.

Visual Basic apps have full designer support, including automatically updating code-behind files and IntelliSense and refactoring for both XAML and Visual Basic. For example, in this app let's give the Panorama control a name. Add Name ="panorama1" to the Panorama tag like this:

You can now switch to the code window and get IntelliSense when you try to complete Me.panorama1. In the InitializeComponent method add Me.panorama1.Title="VB WP7" and hit F5. This launches the app in the Windows Phone emulator.

You can click-drag in the emulator to swipe and slide the app to use the panorama metaphor. Notice that hitting F5 launches the app in debug mode. You can use regular debugger features like setting breakpoints and using watch windows, call stack window, etc.

 

 

 

 

Note that if you have phone unlocked and connected, you can debug directly on the phone as well. All you need to do is change the deployment target before hitting F5:

As you can see, this is a full featured CTP of Visual Basic for Windows Phone Development.  Note that Windows Phone 7 has already shipped and only supports C# at this time.  The functionality in this CTP will be included in a future version of Windows Phone (details will be provided in the future).  When we formally release the VB tools you should expect the functionality will be included in a corresponding Express release for the phone in addition to a plug-in for Visual Studio Pro (and above).

Here are some additional useful links:

Please try out this CTP and let us know what you think.

Enjoy!