Having sat through the MIX keynote I was excited to see the announcement of the Windows Phone 7 series development tools. These can all be downloaded from http://developer.windowsphone.com. The downloads are only compatible with VS2010 RC and so installing these on my main machine (which I haven’t had a chance to upgrade from the beta) is going to be a major effort. I thought I’d go an install them on one of my many virtual machines I have running on my Hyper-V server – FAIL… According to the release notes this is not a supported option. I also noticed that round-tripping between VS and Blend is not supported – doesn’t that defeat the whole purpose?
Scenarios Not Supported
- Opening Windows Phone projects in Expression Blend® is not supported, except for Expression Blend 4 Beta with “MICROSOFT EXPRESSION BLEND ADD-IN PREVIEW FOR WINDOWS PHONE.”
- Round-trip editing of the Windows Phone projects between Expression Blend and Visual Studio is not supported.
- Windows XP and Windows Server® are not supported.
- Virtual PC and Hyper-V™ are not supported.
I’m actually guessing the issue with Virtual PC/Hyper-V is to do with the emulator, rather than the actual developer experience. This is something that we saw with very old versions of the Windows Mobile emulator where they couldn’t be run in a virtual machine – this was fixed when the emulator was moved to true ARM emulation.
Update: I’ve just finished installing the tools on a VM and the emulator, whilst slow to load the first time did in fact load and run my hello world application. Big kudos to Microsoft – the tooling looks great so far.
Also, don’t forget to check out the following discussion documents on the platform and designing for Windows Phone 7 series.