Visual Basic comes to Windows Phone

Thursday, 23 September 2010

You can now use VB to write Windows Phone apps. At the moment it's only an early access program and you can only create Silverlight apps. But it is enough to demonstrate that VB will be equal to C# the near future.

Visual Basic is still a popular language but many of its strongest proponents often complain that compared to C# it is neglected. For example the initial Windows Phone tools were C# only - now that's all changed.

Starting today, you can download Microsoft Visual Basic CTP for Windows Phone Developer Tools.

Applications built using the CTP run on both the emulator and the phone. To try the CTP, you'll need the final version of Windows Phone Developer Tools and Visual Studio 2010 Professional or higher. If you don't have Visual Studio 2010 Professional, you can install the free trial of Visual Studio Professional.

To be clear you can't use the Express version of VB. You are also restricted to Silverlight apps - there is no XNA support. However the Map, Pivot and Panorama controls are all available.

The CTP includes Visual Studio 2010 project templates, item templates, designer support, emulator support, debugging, and IntelliSense for Visual Basic. After installing the CTP, Visual Studio 2010 Professional and higher users will find Windows Phone project types for Visual Basic in the New Project Dialog.

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Microsoft emphasises the fact that this is an early access program and you can expect bugs and odd behaviors. For this reason there is no Go-live licence and you can't submit VB apps the the Windows Phone App Store. There is no date set for final release.

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