Well, with the official RTM for windows mobile 7 today, I thought I might grab the developer tools (beta) and have a bit of a play. So, over to the Windows Phone Developer site to download the tools.
The download was a very smooth process (as it should be, it’s just an ISO). I mounted the ISO as a drive and clicked setup.exe.. FAIL!!!
So, I started checking all the pre-reqs.
- Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate (Check) *
- Windows Vista/Window 7 (FAIL)
Yep, I’m at work, and my development machine is still running Windows XP. It’s a brand new box, 2.8GH Xeon processor, 4GB ram, SSD hard drive and Windows XP..
It seems the emulator for WinMo7 requires DirectX 10.1, which is why it won’t run on XP. It’s not a huge issue for me, because I have a few Win 7 machines at home that I can have a play with.
What does concern me however, is that there are a number of businesses/government agencies out there who still run Windows XP and will take another year or more to migrate. During that time, they are effectively locked out of doing development for a new exciting platform.
Will this effect the uptake of devices in a corporate setting?? Possibly. What it means for me is that it’s going to be very hard to push for WinMo7 as a platform until the organisation upgrades, which could still be a year or more away.
* The developer tools install VS 2010 express, but the tools can still be used from inside the full version of 2010.
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