Windows Phone 7 Beta Tools

I cannot believe I have only been working on the Windows Phone 7 team for three months.  So much has happened, it feels like a lifetime.  What’s been most impressive to me has been the pace of the engineering team.  Considering how many technologies from across the company we are bringing to WP7, it’s absolutely amazing what they are doing.

This week, during Andy Lees’s keynote at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, we announced that the Windows Phone Developer Tools have gone BETA.  Beta means that we have a near final version of the tools for building apps and games for Windows Phone 7.

I wanted to share with the community just how excited the developer community has been.  As a data guy, I like numbers because they tend not to lie.  Since the Mix10 release in March of the first CTP tools (and then the refresh in April), we have seen over 200K downloads of the Windows Phone Developer Tools.  That was before we shipped a Beta, and certainly before we had 5M devices in market to fuel demand.  At some point we’ll release the Beta download numbers, but based on the number of people registered for the live training course next week (hint: it’s got a comma in it), there’s a lot of people who want to build apps for Windows Phone 7.

For me, that’s a pretty solid indicator of the excitement levels, how much our developer community is anticipating getting involved with WP7, and that it is time to get serious about building apps and games, or building out your business, for Windows Phone 7.  The opportunities are plenty, even if you don’t want to build apps.  We showed one of our partners, Preemptive Solutions, on stage at WPC showing how they are building analytics tools so that app developers can build better apps.  Get creative, and start building.  Stay nerdy my friends.