The Windows Phone Developer Tools October 2010 Update (and breath) has been quietly released.

It includes a major tool for debugging applications on devices, that was mentioned back in the Summer during Microsoft WP7 Jump Start training, but not publically released.

It allows you to debug WP7 applications on a connected device without running the Zune software.

This is a good thing for two reason (personally to me at least):

• You don’t have to launch the huge Zune software to do device debugging
• It allows debugging of applications using certain features that could not be used when the Zune software was running with a connected device: Media Launchers or Choosers; XNA Framework playback of song objects; Silverlight playback of video or audio content using the MediaElement control

To use it:

Connect your device

Close the Zune software if running – and you can prevent it from launching on device connect by going to Settings->General and uncheck the appropriate box.

Open a command prompt and navigate to:

• For 32-bit OS – %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v7.0\Tools\WPConnect
• For 64-bit OS – %ProgramFiles(x86)%\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v7.0\Tools\WPConnect

Run WPConnect.exe

That’s it – now you can debug on the device without the Zune software ‘in the way’.

To go back to using Zune, just launch it again.