The main blog post from the WP7 dev team is Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh! and gives a great basic overview. If you want to get straight to the bits, that link is Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP - April Refresh. You will want to pay attention to the Release Notes this release as there are breaking changes if you have any projects created in the first CTP. There is also an overview of what has changed on MSDN, What's New in Windows Phone 7 CTP Refresh.

If you followed my post about Ultimate support (Windows Phone 7 Installation User Errors With Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate RC), there are a couple of caveats to uninstalling the RC bits. You may run into more problems when trying to install the CTP Refresh so hopefully this will help eliminate some headache ahead of time.

1. Do not uninstall individual pieces like XNA or heaven forbid Visual Studio 2010 Express. The installer keeps track of everything it puts on your system and will proceed to add it back if it is missing. In the case of no VS2010, as The_Zman found out the hard way and had to reinstall the Express RC separate.
2. The CTP leaves two things that the refresh needs to be removed before it will install: Silverlight 4 SDK and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express Prerequisites x86 or x64 depending on your system.
3. I had a link to the Silverlight 4 Tools that have now been refreshed to RTM. That link is actually no longer needed as VS2010 RTM installs them for you.

Hope this reiteration will save some of you the grief The_Zman or ElementCy ran into. Happy hax0rin!

So, you want to develop applications for Windows Phone 7. You have access to the public Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Release Candidate and would rather use that because Express feels to wimpy. You should know that before you travel down this rabbit hole, you will have copies of both Ultimate and Express on your computer by the time you are done installing.

You will need to install in this order:

1. Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate RC ISO
2. Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP (Installer | Release Notes)
3. Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010

I put the individual links to the setup and release notes for a reason: you'll really need both.  Before you start anything, I suggest reading the Installation category numbers 1-4. You may not be able to install it at all so you might as well know up front. If you run as a normal user for development (and you should), #6 is very important. Considering the alternative is always running VS 2010 as an administrator, this is a better option.

After the beasts overtake your hard drive (post installation):

The uninstallation category itself is pretty tame but uninstalling any portion of the Developer Tools CTP that it will have to install it again before you can remove the entire thing, or in my case reinstall it because I erroneously installed Express before Ultimate. This is a small issue to keep everything as one cohesive unit because I remember the XNA uninstall experience to be more difficult.

If you happen to run Visual Studio and open a project without installing the Silverlight 4 Tools first you will be prompted by a MessageBox with a link to download. Since I had to copy/paste/paste the URL into a web browser, I figured I would save someone else the trouble and point out the necessity of having it installed. This was the very reason that sparked the post in the first place because it seemed too big not to be mentioned anywhere in my Google searches.

Taming the beasts (development):

While developing, I would also suggest paying close attention to the entire Silverlight Application Development heading. #5 outlines specific parts of Ultimate that will not function, like Testing. Most of these quirks are because this is a very early CTP build. The beta and release candidates should have a lot of the known issues worked out.

Update: In doing research on the expiration dates I realized that Ultimate RC expires on June 30th, 2010. Considering the CTP will only run on the RC bits, this poses a bit of a problem. The version of Express that is installed expires on May 13, 2011 so the likely course of action is to just use that after June 30th or when you switch to RTM. You can find out how many days each SKU has by going to Help/About. Thanks to Caspar Kleijne and Diego Ponciano for pointing me in the right direction via Twitter.

I'm back from my holidays, so here's a list of news from the XNA world that stacked up, and you might have missed:

Nuclex welcomes us to the first part of his XNA Game Archtiecture Series, where he talks about his proposed development tree and third party libraries.

The series of Free Game Assets continues with a new free pack of Planet Sprites and Textures.

Innovative Game's "Game Engine Tutorial" continues with a new part about the Content Manager.

Shawn Hargreaves has two very enlightening posts the you should definitely read. This first is "Bug or Feature" talking about a bug in Extreme G that was seen as a feature by reviewers. The second one talks about AI Coordinate Systems, as used in Moto GP.

Finally, Nick Gravelyn posted some tweaks to his Interpolators.

Let's start with the spring of 2007 (Year 1 of the Age of XNA). As brave programmers started using XNA, they started to worry about the effects that this new form of magic would have on their surroundings, which had to be kept free of residual energies (a.k.a. garbage). People were most worried about the foreach spell, rumored to generate such energies. Thus, the mighty wizard Eli looked into the problem, and wrote two scrolls on how the foreach spell is better used, but most importantly, he left us notes on how to investigate such problems ourselves, through a ritual called memory profiling, using the CLR Profiler, and the XNA Framework Remote Performance Monitor for Xbox 360. These two scrolls can be found and read in Eli's book here and here.

At the same time, another XNA apprentice wrote about a related ritual called CPU profiling, through which other XNA apprentices could learn why their creations were slow, and lazy, by using a tool called NProf. Those that want to can still read Thomas Aylesworth's writings here.

Over a year later, bittermanandy was writing a chronicle about what recipes and rituals he found most useful in his delvings into XNA, and in one of these chronicles, he touched on the subject of the CLR Profiler again. That same year, jwatte gave away a free potion that could be used for performing the profiling ritual in the kingdom of the Xbox 360, which was not possible using NProf. MJP made a comparison between events and virtual functions, using the Stopwatch spell, and left his writing for all to read in one of his scrolls.

More recently, in Year 3 of the Age of XNA, the Grand Master Wizard Shawn, reminded all of us how important is that we use the profiling rituals as often as possible, and gave us an example of using the blunt yet powerful spell Stopwatch.

We hope you liked our return to past scrolls of wisdom, and found something of help in them. Please let us know what you think, and leave a note in the notebook below.

Challenge #1 Dual Buttons

Theme/Rules:

Your game is only allowed two buttons or keys. You cannot use triggers, thumbsticks, or other analog input. A directional pad can be used, but each direction counts as one button. You can use these buttons in combination, context, or any other mechanism in your game; the only requirement is that only two physical binary inputs are utilized in the game.

Challenge Time:

October 25, 2009 – November 1st, 2009 (Entries due by 12:00 PST GMT-8 on November 2nd, 2009).

To Enter:

Email your entry to contact@xna7day.com with the subject line “Challenge 1 Entry”.

Please see the About page for full rules/guidelines for the challenge. Since this challenge was started with this post, those rules are also valid for this first challenge.