Visual Basic on Windows Phone: From CTP to RTW to OMFG

VB for WP7 went RTW? OMFG!

Back in September, I wrote about the release of the CTP (Community Technology Preview) of Visual Basic for Silverlight development on Windows Phone. As a CTP, it was early access to a work in progress, there was no “go-live” license (meaning any apps you wrote in VB couldn’t be for commercial release) and there was no guarantee that it would become a released product.

All that changed a couple of days ago when VB for WP7 went RTW (Release To World). It’s an actual thing now: you can write Silverlight apps for Windows Phone and you can sell them in Marketplace. We’ve also updated our Windows Phone example code to include VB examples. With VB (Visual Basic) for WP7 (Windows Phone 7), one of the MRF (Most Requested Features) has been implemented. Cue a lot of developers saying “OMFG!”

(In case you were wondering, the “F” is for “Phone”.)

Get VB for WP7 Developer Tools

You can download the Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools RTW right now. There are a couple of things to keep in mind:

• You need Visual Studio 2010 Pro, Premium or Ultimate. Sorry, but Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone isn’t going to work with this version. If you’re really itching to try writing VB apps for WP7 and only have the Express version of Visual Studio, we suggest downloading a trial version of Visual Studio Pro.
• Visual Basic for Windows Phone is for writing Silverlight apps only. If you want to write XNA-based games and apps, you have to do it in C#.

Start Building Apps in VB

Once you’ve installed Visual Basic for Windows Phone Developer Tools, go to Jason Zander’s blog, where he walks through the process of building a tip calculator app in Visual Basic. He’s also posted the complete solution online so you can download it, check out the code, tinker with it and learn from it. Remember the motto: Don’t learn to build, build to learn!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.