Microsoft Silverlight

A few months back I blogged about a great product in Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) called the Asset Inventory Service (AIS) and how it can help you better manage your hardware and software inventory using a cloud based service. IT Pros have been telling us that they really like AIS since it helps them get the inventory of machines that don’t always connect into the corporate network and how easy it is to maintain since there is no server infrastructure.

One of the most popular pages in the Windows Phone 7 documentation is the Code Samples topic. On this page you can find a series of code samples that demonstrate various features of Windows Phone 7. But somewhat hidden away at the bottom of the topic are links to some Starter Kits. These Starter Kits are fully functional applications – in fact, you can find these apps in the Marketplace and try them out on your phone. The complete source code for the entire application is available to download and tinker with.

Back in September, we released the CTP of Visual Basic for the Windows Phone Developer Tools. Today we're pleased to announce the immediate availability of the RTW version of the Visual Basic add-on. You can immediately download VB support for the Windows Phone developer tools.

The big news is that you can now build and release Silverlight applications and games for Windows Phone built in Visual Basic to the Windows Phone Marketplace.

PDC is on, and you can watch it online. Right now, I am attending Oren Nachman’s session, Optimizing Performance for Silverlight Windows Phone Applications. Oren is a tester in the Windows Phone team who really hammered the platform searching for nasty bugs, and he did find a few.

I’m very excited to share with this blog community, that our Windows Phone engineering team has hit a very meaningful milestone; one that we’re calling technical preview. We are certainly not done yet – but the craftsmen (and women) of our team have signed off that our software is now ready for the hands-on everyday use of a broad set of consumers around the world – and we’re looking forward to their feedback in the coming weeks, so that we can finish the best Windows Phone release ever together.

We have discovered that the latest update of Silverlight 4 (the “GDR0 of SL4”) which hit Microsoft Update last Thursday can cause the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP – April Refresh to fail to install.

If this SL4 update has been installed and you try to install the tools CTP Refresh the installation will fail while attempting to install Silverlight 4.

The Windows Phone 7 Series UI Design and Interaction Guide is available for download as a PDF from from microsoft.com here.

From the introduction: