What’s New in the latest Phone Developer Tools

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.