Microsoft Releases Final Windows Phone 7 Dev Tools

cgriffin21 writes "Microsoft on Thursday released the final Windows Phone 7 developer tools to manufacturing, giving coders a couple of weeks' lead time to get their apps ready for the launch of the Windows Phone Marketplace in early October. Microsoft released the Windows Phone 7 OS to manufacturing on Sept. 1, and its OEM partners are in the process of testing it on handsets. The Windows Phone 7 developer tools are the final piece of the puzzle for Microsoft, which is now ready to march back into a mobile market where it has fallen alarmingly behind the leaders." In related news, CNET reports that Windows Phone 7 will only be available for GSM networks at launch, with a CDMA version planned for the first half of next year. This rules out Sprint and Verizon for launch.

Re:Is it really Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

ZuneOS is WinCE 6 Based.

Re:Android, iOS, Blackberry OS, Windows Phone 7?

[Anonymous Coward]

As of now, we have a number of distinct platforms for writing smartphone apps, and each is different from each other by a large degree: We have Objective C for iOS, Java for Android/BlackberryOS, XNA or Silverlight for Windows Phone 7, and C++ for Symbian (IIRC). XBox coders will be fine with XNA for the platform, but iOS and Android app writers will not bother because it is a completely different platform and architecture.

This is confusingly stated, as you listed two .NET-based frameworks (XNA and Silverlight) alongside with specific languages (Obj-C, Java, C++) when it is clear that you meant environments. iOS is native (C, C++, Obj-C, etc), Android is native & Dalvik (JVM), and WP7 amounts to .NET.

The Silverlight CLR is smaller and more limited than .NET's CLR but the important part is that it still runs CIL (aka MSIL) bytecode. That means any .NET language can theoretically target WP7. AFAIK C#, F#, and VB.NET officially target Silverlight (with built-in compiler/library/IDE support), but with effort most emitted bytecode should be manually portable to run on Silverlight... like some (not all) existing C++/CLI code, for instance.