WP7 What to do before the tools are released.

Ok so you have just read the announcement on the Windows Phone Developer Blog that we won’t be seeing the tools for a few more weeks.

And you have just read that the Pano Pivot and Bing maps controls are finally being released too.

And now your thinking ‘I can’t wait till then’. Well here is what to do.

Well for Pano and Pivot use this codeplex project: http://phone.codeplex.com/

For the Bing maps follow this post: http://www.silverlighthack.com/post/2010/03/21/Using-the-Silverlight-Bing-Maps-control-on-the-Windows-Phone-7.aspx

I can tell you with great confidence that these things work well with the tools beta as Sequence has compiled an app that is functionally rich and runs without glitch. So don’t skimp on functionality because you don’t have what we have been promised.

I am glad that we haven’t taken a different approach for our UI and am really looking forward to getting my hands on the final version.

Just make sure you allow yourself half a day to move your code into the official controls. I get a feeling that it’s not going to be hard to move but it may be fiddly.

On another note how cool is it that 300K copies of the tools have been downloaded. People really are going to have to make sure their App shines above the rest to make money. The game is on peeps lets make the new WP7 platform a big success.