Developer Tools For Windows Phone 7 Are Final

Microsoft’s Windows Phone Developer Tools are final and released to the Web. Developers creating apps for the company’s upcoming smartphone platform will need to download this newest version of the tools to gain validation.

In order to build an app storefront capable of competing against Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Marketplace, though, Microsoft is encouraging third-party developers to begin designing for Windows Phone 7. Twitter, Netflix, OpenTable, Flixster and Travelocity will be some of the higher-profile companies with apps available for Windows Phone 7 upon the platform’s release.

Old Tools Invalid

“Any application built with a previous version of the tools will fail application certification in the Marketplace,” Brandon Watson, Microsoft’s director of developer experience for Windows Phone 7, wrote in a posting on The Windows Phone Developer Blog. “When you do submit your application, you can expect it to take about five days to pass or fail certification, though you can check the status of your app submission at any time at the developer portal.”

The developer-tools download includes Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, the Windows Phone Emulator, Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone, and XNA Game Studio 4.0. It is only available in English at the moment, although French, Italian, German and Spanish versions are expected in the next few weeks.

Last year, Microsoft executives publicly announced a target of 600 apps at launch for Windows Mobile 6.5. They missed. This time around, the company remains tight-lipped about the number of apps it expects for Windows Phone 7. The company has specific internal targets for the size of its app storefront, Watson said, but would keep those under wraps.

“We’re really focused on quality. We have pretty lofty aspirations,” he told eWEEK. “We have to show developers that they can build applications – that they can make money. So we’re really focused on the quality of the applications.

“If you want apps, you need to get the developers excited about the platform,” he added

Controls available with the developer tools include Pivot, which allows for the filtering of massive amounts of data, and Panorama, which extends an application’s actionable area into what Watson called “a long horizontal canvas that extends beyond the confines of the screen”. Pivot and Panorama elements are already baked into the Windows Phone 7 interface.

Developers can also leverage the Bing Maps control, which Watson described to eWEEK as encapsulating “all our Bing Maps products into a single app.”

More financially-driven developers will be interested in the Mobile Advertising SDK which will pair with a real-time, bid-based mobile ad exchange.

Microsoft hopes that Windows Phone 7 will prove popular enough to reverse the company’s market-share slide in the smartphone arena, where it faces substantial competition from the likes of the Apple iPhone, RIM’s BlackBerry, and the Google Android franchise. The first smartphones running Windows Phone 7 are rumoured for release in October.