It’s a big day for Microsoft and I’ve had a great ride to this point.

The RTM of the Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools have now been released.

See the update MSDN documentation.

Get the tools.  Be sure to correctly uninstall previously installed versions of the tools (see the release notes) before installing.

Read the release notes.

Let’s take a look at the highlights of what’s new in RTM of the WP7 Developer Tools, largely from a Silverlight application development point of view.

Panorama Control

There have been a few 3rd party open source goes at a Panorama Control (and no-one can blame them for getting a little impatient – it’s like the Office ribbon), but now there’s an official one (which was explain recently in a blog entry by Jeff Wilcox).  You can include one by starting with the new dedicate Visual Studio template (under File->New Project), use the one in the toolbox, or add it via XAML.  See the documentation.  Use it to get UI like this:

Pivot Control

The new official Pivot control is just as easy to use.  See the documentation to produce things like this:

 

Bing Maps Silverlight Control for Windows Phone

While the previously available control worked on the phone, it was not optimized for the phone.  This new version rocks!  Check out the docs.  You’ll also want to get yourself a developer key.

Other changes:

The tools and emulator have performance improvements.  Check out Microsoft’s paper on creating high performing Silverlight apps.

The documentation has been updated.

Be sure to read the release notes.

What’s missing to round out the platform? 

I’ll do another post on this topic soon.