It’s been a busy time for the Windows Phone team at Microsoft. On Tuesday, the company announced that the highly-anticipated update to the Windows Phone mobile operating system known as “Mango” had been released to manufacturing. This is an important milestone indicating the final phase of of Mango’s development.
Now developers are being offered an updated SDK to complement release: the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 “Beta 2 Refresh.” And they can also download a new pre-release build of Mango onto their retail devices, too, says Microsoft.
Sadly, the pre-release build of Mango being pushed down to developer handsets is not the new Mango RTM build. Even developers have to wait like everyone else for that. (Darn it!) But Microsoft says that the pre-release build will have everything developers need to update their apps for Mango, including both the tools and the OS image.
What’s New?
In the updated toolkit, the APIs are now locked, which means developers can be comfortable in knowing that nothing major will change between now and next month, when Mango apps can be submitted to the Windows Phone Marketplace.
Also new is a screenshot capability in the emulator, an improved profiler, the addition of NuGet and a peek at the Marketplace Test Kit, which can be used to test XAP files against Microsoft’s certification testing tools.
How to Get It
To get the update, developers should back up their phone, head over to connect.microsoft.com and download the new files. (Further installation details are available here).
