Quick run through of the WP7 Developer Tools January 2011

In case you haven’t heard the latest WP7 Developers Tool update was released yesterday and contains a few goodies. First you need to go and grab the bits here.

You can install them in any order but I installed the WindowsPhoneDeveloperResources_en-US_Patch1.msp first.

Then the VS10-KB2486994-x86.exe.

They install silently. In other words you would need to check Programs and Features and look in Installed Updates to see if they installed successfully. Like the screenshot below:

Once you get them installed you can try out a few new features.

Like Copy and Paste.

Just fire up your application and put a TextBox on it and Select the Text and you will have the option highlighted in red above the text.

Once you select it you will have the option to paste it. (see red rectangle below).

Another feature is the Windows Phone Capability Detection Tool – This tool detects the phone capabilities used by your application. This will prevent you from submitting an app to the marketplace that says it uses x feature but really does not.

How do you use it?

Well navigate out to either directory:

• %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v7.0\Tools\CapDetect

• %ProgramFiles (x86)%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v7.0\Tools\CapDetect

and run the following command: 

CapabilityDetection.exe Rules.xml YOURWP7XAPFILEOUTPUTDIRECTORY

So in my example you will see my app only requires the ID_CAP_MICROPHONE.

Let’s see what the WmAppManifest.xml says in our WP7 Project:

Whoa! That’s a lot of extra stuff we don’t need. We can delete unused capabilities safely now.

Some of the other fixes are: (Copied straight from Microsoft)

• Fixes a text selection bug in pivot and panorama controls. In applications that have pivot or panorama controls that contain text boxes users can unintentionally change panes when trying to copy text. To prevent this problem open your application recompile it and then resubmit it to the Windows Phone Marketplace.
• Windows Phone Connect Tool – Allows you to connect your phone to a PC when Zune® software is not running and debug applications that use media APIs. For more information see How to: Use the Connect Tool.
• Updated Bing Maps Silverlight Control – Includes improvements to gesture performance when using Bing™ Maps Silverlight® Control.
• Windows Phone Developer Tools Fix allowing deployment of XAP files over 64 MB in size to physical phone devices for testing and debugging.

That’s pretty much it. Thanks again for reading my blog!