Windows Phone Developer Tools Updated

  • Article

Late on Friday we released an update version of the Windows Phone Developer Tools. There’s a good post on the Windows Phone Developer Blog that summarises what’s in there and the impact on existing applications. More on this below. There’s one slightly confusing statement in that post though - it says:

“This update also replaces the October 2010 update, including all of the fixes from that patch. If you are building a new machine with a new developer environment, this version of the Windows Phone Developer Tools is all you need.”

The 2nd sentence contradicts the first and I think it’s misleading. You must have the RTM WPDT installed before installing this update (according to the release notes).

There in fact two parts to the update – an updated version of the WPDT and a fix for VS2010. You can install in any order. Note that if you install the updated WPDT and then subsequently uninstall, you will revert back to WPDT RTM version (not the October update version even if you had that installed previously). Got that? You can read the release notes here.

A key thing to note is that existing apps in Marketplace will continue to work with updated phones. And apps built with the new tools will be compatible both with updated phones and those that haven’t yet been updated.

This version of WPDT contains updated reference assemblies and an emulator image with the latest OS updates including copy & paste. Copy & paste gets enabled in TextBox, PasswordBox and text input fields in a WebBrowser control. You can test the new c&p functionality in the emulator to make sure it works as expected in your application(s).

There is one scenario where you may have to recompile an existing application to achieve the expected user experience. If you’ve embedded a text box in a Pivot or Panorama control, the act of copying text can cause the control to detect the gesture and change panes. New versions of the controls are included in the update to resolve this issue. The app should be recompiled with the updated tools and re-submitted to Marketplace.

There’s also a fix for deploying XAP files over 64MB in size to physical devices included as well as versions of the capability detection tool, connect tool and Bing Maps Silverlight Control (I’m just checking whether or not these have been updated in this release).