Windows Phone Dev Tools Refreshed for ‘Mango’

You can download the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 “Beta 2 Refresh” from the ‘Mango’ Connect site, according to the Windows Phone blog post Another Helping of Mango for Devs.

According to Cliff Simpkins of the Windows Phone team, “We’ve received positive feedback on the Mango tools and bits we’ve shared, but appreciate that many devs are still interested in working with a more complete build. Today’s refresh of the tools represent a month of great progress by the engineering team, further refining and improving the Mango developer experience.”

The release is a genuine release candidate build, with enough code checked in and APIs locked down that this OS is close enough to RTM that, as a developer, it’s more than capable to see you through the upcoming RC drop of the tools and app submission.

Top Five Improvements

Simpkins named the top five improvements for the SDK:

• Application platform APIs are now locked; you can feel confident to start getting ready for submitting your apps next month.
• Emulator now has screenshot capability built in.
• The profiler has been greatly improved and provides memory profiling.
• As of this drop, you can install NuGet into the free version of the WPSDK tools.
• The drop includes an initial peek at the Marketplace Test Kit; with the RC release, you’ll be able to use the included version of this toolkit to test your XAP file against the same certification testing tools that we use when ingesting apps for the Marketplace. For this refresh, it’s there but not fully functional; but more on this in a future blog post.

Next Steps

With WPSDK RC about a month away, now is the time to update your app to Mango:

• Get the tools: If you’re a registered App Hub developer and you haven’t already activated the invitation code, go activate it now and get the tools from Connect!
• Evaluate the impact of Fast App Switching and other Mango capabilities to your app. There’s an ever-growing list of developer resources that the team is producing to help you get to your apps to Mango.
• App Compat should be top of mind. Take a look at the short list of top potential app compat concerns.
• Lastly, if you’ve even considered Mango I would greatly appreciate you taking five minutes of your time to answer a short survey about updating to Mango.

Bruce D. KyleISV Architect Evangelist | Microsoft Corporation