To begin development and learn how to build Windows Phone applications, we need Windows Phone Developer Tools set. It includes Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, Windows Phone Emulator, XNA Game Studio, Expression Blend for Windows Phone, samples, and documentations. If you have already installed Visual Studio Professional or later versions, an additional Add-In for Visual Studio will automatically be installed. It has reached RTW version on September 16th 2010 and can be obtained here.
System Requirements
• Operating System: Windows 7 and Windows Vista
- Windows Vista (x86 and x64) ENU Service Pack 2 all editions other than Starter o Windows 7 (x86 and x64) ENU – all editions other than Starter
• Hard disk with a minimum 3GB free space
• Recommend 2 GB of memory
• Graphic card that supports DirectX 10 with WDDM 1.1 driver
Windows Phone Emulator Requirements
Running the emulator requires system configurations as in system requirements and more attention to these points:
• .xap packet no more than 400MB
• No GPU usage
• Only supports VC-1 encoding, no support for blur and drop-shadow
• Data in isolated storage will be stored in emulator until activated
• Does not support multi touch simulation using mouse; only devices that actually have multi touch feature may support the simulation
• Accelerometer, GPS, and camera cannot be used as in the real device
