Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh available now

Calling all Windows Phone 7 developers! Great news for you all. Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP has been refreshed and now works with Visual Studio 2010 RTM! This means that you can now install the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP – April Refresh along with Visual Studio 2010 RTM to work on your apps.

Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh boasts a lot of new features, some of them are given below.

• This release has been tested to work with the final release of Visual Studio 2010.
• An updated Windows Phone 7 OS image for the Windows Phone Emulator.
• A few APIs in the frameworks have been added and or changed.
• The documentation has been updated with new and expanded topics. See this MSDN page for more details.
• We’ve provided limited support for launchers and choosers. In cases where the underlying built-in experience is not present launchers and choosers are still not available (i.e. the email chooser asks you to select a contact, but there are no contacts in the emulator and no way to add one).
• Pause/Resume events are now supported.
• If the tools are installed as the admin user, non-admin users are now able to deploy to the emulator.
• A problem with incremental deployment of projects has been fixed.
• A problem resulting in the error “Connection failed because of invalid command-line arguments” being displayed during project creation has been fixed.
• A problem where the Windows Phone node was not appearing in VS 2010 on non-system drives has been fixed.
• Design time skin refresh issues have been addressed.

Also keep in mind:

• Uninstall the previous CTP first (the item in Add/Remove programs to uninstall is “Microsoft Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP-ENU”)
• If you have the RC of VS2010 installed, uninstall it first and then install the final release.
• You can install Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP even if you do not have Visual Studio already installed.
• We’ve introduced a few ‘breaking changes’ with this release. The one that will impact almost everyone who used the existing release is a requirement that all WMAppManifest.xml files have a filled out <CAPABILITIES> section. The release notesdescribe this in more detail and the tools will warn you when you open an existing project.

For more information, read the release notes. Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP – April Refresh is available for download here.