I mentioned in one of my previous post about installing the new Windows Phone Dev Tools. The whole installation process is smooth and less complicated.

As a Blend Designer the most important thing I liked is that I can use the same Blend4 to work on either WPF, Silverlight or Windows Phone Application.

After the installation when you start Blend 4 and select “New Project” from the startup screen, now you can see Windows Phone is also in the List.

If you have used the Beta Dev Tools, in the final version you will see new options for Phone Development like Panorama and Pivot Applications as shown in figure above. I tried both the Panorama & Pivot Applications. Both the Templates have its own appeal and depending on your choice, you can use either of them.

Pivot Application	Panorama Application

I personally liked Pivot Application. It kind of reminds me of Zune HD interface which I love so much. In terms of performance also Pivot App is better, it offers a better start time.

Panorama give you parallax effect which looks really cool and smooth. In Pivot you don’t have parallax, but you can definitely set the background image for the app.

Will keep posting more as I dive deep into the Dev Tools.

Aaron Stebner in his blogpost mentions about the problems some users are facing after installing the final release of Dev Tools for Windows Phone. I am sure this piece of information by Aaron would be useful to many. Check it out

He mentions that after the installation, the default value for the deployment dropdown for Silverlight and XNA Game Studio 4.0 Windows Phone projects is the device instead of the emulator. To rectify this Aaron asks the users to follow following steps :

1. Close any instances of the emulator and Visual Studio 2010 that are running on your computer
2. Delete the folder named “%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Phone Tools”
3. Re-start Visual Studio 2010

Thanks Aaron for the important piece of information. Do follow Aaron’s blog at :http://blogs.msdn.com/astebner/default.aspx. I am sure you will find excellent information on WiX, XNA, the .NET Framework and Visual Studio.

Microsoft has released the final version of the Windows Phone Developer Tools. The new setup automatically installs following:

• Phone flavored versions of Expression Blend,
• Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone and
• Silverlight for Windows Phone 7
• XNA Game Studio for Windows Phone 7
• Windows Phone Emulator
• Phone Registration Tool

This installation updates the already installed Expression Blend 4, if you already have it on your system. Which means you can use the same Blend4 for creating WPF, Silverlight and Windows Phone applications.

Uninstalling Previous Versions

If you have previous releases of the Phone Developer Tools you will need to uninstall them completely including the Blend 4 for Windows Phone, also you should uninstall the following prior to installing the final version of Developer Tools:

• Microsoft Windows Phone Developer Tools Beta
• Windows Phone 7 Add-in for Visual Studio 2010 Beta – ENU
• Microsoft Windows Phone Developer Resources
• Microsoft XNA Game Studio 4.0
• Microsoft XNA Game Studio 4.0 Windows Phone Extensions.

Once you have uninstalled the above components you are ready to run the new setup.

Setup Details

Initial Setup file (vm_web.exe) size is 3.21MB.

This setup will download the Final Windows Phone Developer tools (357 MB)

I am excited about the new developer tools. Have fun Developing new Windows Phone App :)

EDIT: Totally forgot to give the link to download Developer Tools :) . Click here to download them.

DZone has just published a Refcard written by me on “Application Prototyping with SketchFlow”. You can read the Refcard at http://refcardz.dzone.com/refcardz/application-prototyping.

Refcards are free cheat sheets for developers published by DZone. You can find out more about Refcard at http://refcardz.dzone.com