4/26/2010

These are the release notes for the Community Technology Preview (CTP Refresh, April 2010) release of Windows Phone Developer Tools.

System Requirements

Supported Operating System

  • Windows® Vista® (x86 and x64) ENU with Service Pack 2 – all editions except Starter Edition
  • Windows 7 (x86 and x64) ENU – all editions except Starter Edition

Hardware

  • Installation requires 3 GB of free disk space on the system drive.
  • 2 GB RAM
  • XNA® Game Studio deployment to Windows® Phone Emulator requires a DirectX® 10 or later graphics card with WDDM 1.1 driver. For additional information, see item #1 in Windows Phone Deployment and Debugging in XNA Game Studio.
  • DirectX 10 capable card with a WDDM 1.1 driver is needed to take advantage of GPU acceleration on the Windows Phone Emulator for a Silverlight application. The DX10 card is optional for Silverlight applications.

Installation

  1. If you have installed a previous version of Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh, you must uninstall it before installing the new version.
  2. You can install Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP even if you do not have Visual Studio already installed.
  3. Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP is only compatible with the English version of Visual Studio® 2010 RTM.
    You cannot install Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP on a computer that has other versions of Visual Studio 2010 on it. For additional information, see Installation in Known Issues.
  4. Click on the Windows Phone Developers Tools link and follow the instructions.

Uninstallation

Uninstall Microsoft Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP-ENU from the Control Panel by selecting Uninstall or change a program. This will uninstall all the components installed with this product, including the preview release of XNA Game Studio 4.0.

Known Issues

Installation

Uninstallation

Breaking Changes Between March CTP and April CTP Releases

Silverlight Application Development

Windows Phone Emulator

XNA Game Development

Windows Phone Deployment and Debugging in XNA Game Studio

XNA Framework

Installation

  1. Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP is only compatible with the English version of Visual Studio® 2010 RTM.
    If you have any version of Visual Studio 2010 product family other than Visual Studio 2010 RTM installed on your computer, setup will stop and instruct you to uninstall the product or a set of components.
  2. Installation is only supported on the English-United States (en-US) version of the operating system.
  3. Installation progress screen goes blank when you are navigating the Setup Wizard pages using only the keyboard. Workaround: Use the mouse instead of the keyboard to navigate the Setup Wizard pages.
  4. For additional installation and uninstallation known issues related to Visual Studio 2010, see this ReadMe file.
  5. This preview release of XNA Game Studio 4.0 is only available with the Microsoft Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP.

Uninstallation

  • If you uninstall Microsoft Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP or XNA Game Studio 4.0 from a computer that has XNA Game Studio 3.1 installed, you must repair the XNA Game Studio Platform Tools Component. To repair XNA Game Studio 3.1, you can run the MSI located at %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft XNA\XNA Game Studio\v3.1\Setup\xnags_platform_tools.msi.

Breaking Changes Between March CTP and April CTP Releases

  1. Authenticode signed assemblies fail to load. When including Authenticode signed assemblies in your project, the application XAP will fail to deploy and run. This includes the use of Microsoft client libraries such as WCF Data Services, the Silverlight Toolkit, and 3rd party managed libraries. This issue will be resolved in a future release to permit the inclusion of Authenticode signed assemblies.
  2. Changing orientation default from portrait to landscape mode. XNA Framework games now default to landscape mode instead of portrait mode, unless a preferred back buffer size is explicitly set. However, the landscape mode games do not render correctly on the Windows Phone Emulator, so you need to add code to your project to set the game to portrait mode if you were relying on it being set to portrait mode by default.
    Workaround: Add the following to your game constructor.
    graphics.PreferredBackBufferWidth = 480;
graphics.PreferredBackBufferHeight = 800;
    New Windows Phone projects already set the height and width to portrait in the constructor.
  3. Keyboard input is not working in the emulator for XNA Framework applications. Using the PC keyboard to simulate input in the emulator was working in the March CTP release, but this is not working in the April CTP release. It will be fixed in the coming updates. This issue does not apply to Silverlight applications.
  4. All Applications using Push Notification(existing or new ones ) need to add entry for publisher. Perform the following steps since the default entry for Publisher is empty:
    • Open wmappmanifest.xml, under Properties in the Solution Explorer
    • Edit Publisher="" to Publisher="<something>"
    • Redploy
  5. Adding capabilities to the manifest of existing projects. If you have exisiting projects, you must add the capabilities section to the file named WMAppManifest.xml in the properties folder. Replace the empty capabilities section with the code below. There is a warning dialog when opening old Silverlight projects, but not for XNA Framework projects.
    <Capabilities>
    <Capability Name="ID_CAP_NETWORKING" />
    <Capability Name="ID_CAP_LOCATION" />
    <Capability Name="ID_CAP_SENSORS" />
    <Capability Name="ID_CAP_MICROPHONE" />
    <Capability Name="ID_CAP_MEDIALIB" />
    <Capability Name="ID_CAP_GAMERSERVICES" />
    <Capability Name="ID_CAP_PHONEDIALER" />
    <Capability Name="ID_CAP_PUSH_NOTIFICATION" />
    <Capability Name="ID_CAP_WEBBROWSERCOMPONENT" />
</Capabilities>
  6. Tile and Toast notifications format for the server side has changed. For more information, see Sending a Tile Notification and Sending a Toast Notification sections in the How to Send Push Notification for Windows Phone topic in MSDN.
  7. API changes:
    • Removed BingMapsTask. This is not included in the current release.
    • Renamed ChooserEventArgs to TaskEventArgs.
    • Renamed ApplicationBar property name from Visible to IsVisible.
    • Changed AccelerometerSensor properties. The Default, All, and Information properties were removed. New instances are now obtained with the constructor.
  8. For additional information about new additions in this release, see What’s New in Windows Phone 7 CTP Refresh topic in MSDN.

Silverlight Application Development

  1. In this release, per frame callbacks (i.e. handling the CompsitionTarget.Rendering event) should be used sparingly due to less than optimal performance.
  2. ApplicationBar and related classes cannot participate in data binding and name scopes, so you will need to use code-behind if you want to programmatically change any properties.
  3. Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP includes database components. These components are not supported for application development.
  4. When using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate for Silverlight application development for Windows Phone, the following features are not supported:
    • Profiler
    • IntelliTrace
    • Lab Management
    • Testing
    • Data
      • Show Data Source
      • Add New Date Source
      • Schema Compare
  5. MediaElement will be tinted when the Background property is set on the container of a MediaElement. Workaround: do not set the background or set it to transparent.
  6. The “Support central settings” option under the Application tab of Project Properties is not supported. As a result, debugging the settings task of the application is not supported.
  7. The Add Service Reference option is not supported in the Windows Phone add-in to Visual Studio 2010. Workaround: Use Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone to add service references.
  8. Adding multiple service reference is not supported.
  9. When the same namespace exists between Silverlight® and Windows Phone, pressing F1 Help resolves to Silverlight. This is the default behavior for Visual Studio 2010 RC.
  10. Windows Phone documentation is only available online in MSDN®. A local copy of the Windows Phone documentation is not included in the developer tools download and you cannot get copy via Help Library Manager.

Windows Phone Emulator

  1. Hardware virtualization: To improve the performance of the emulator (including the boot time), you can turn on the hardware virtualization setting.
  2. GPU support: Windows Phone Emulator supports GPU peripheral emulation using the host GPU on a PC that support DDI version 10 and above and DirectX Version 10 and above. On all other machines, the emulator falls back to software emulation which is not optimized for performance.
    You can check if your PC supports the recommended configuration by running ‘dxdiag’ from any command-line window.
  3. Media: The emulator supports the VC-1 (WMV simple, main, and advanced profiles) container for video encoding.
  4. The emulator syncs up to the current time at startup, but not to the current system time zone. Workaround: set up your computer time zone to GMT.
  5. Test servers with fully qualified domain name (FQDN) (for example, http://mytestserver/mydomain.com) are not accessible using the emulator if the host machine is not connected to the network with a proxy server. You have to use the server name (for example, http://mytestserver) directly.
  6. The push client debugging has to wait for two minutes after boot of the emulator (or device) before using the APIs (i.e. Start screen show up).
  7. For push notifications, if the emulator host computer is behind a proxy, SOCKS proxy has to be configured on the host computer. You can go to Control Panel > Network and Internet > Internet Options > Connections tab, and then choose the Setting option to set this configuration.

XNA Game Development

  1. Visual Studio 2010 project upgrade wizard does not support the complete upgrade of XNA Game Studio 3.0 or 3.1 projects to XNA Game Studio 4.0. The wizard will not upgrade XNA game project-specific metadata or XNA game content projects.
    The Visual Studio 2010 Upgrade Wizard has a checkbox specifying if it should create a backup of a Visual Studio project. Selecting this option will not back up XNA game content projects.
    To upgrade a project to XNA Game Studio 4.0, you must create a new game project and add copies of code or assets from your existing project to the new project.
  2. Create copy of project for Windows Phone option is not supported
    In XNA Game Studio, selecting a game project and clicking the Create Copy of Project for Windows Phone menu will not complete the necessary steps to create a copy of an existing Windows game as a Windows Phone game in XNA Game Studio 4.0. After creating the Windows Phone copy, you must perform the following additional steps.
    1. Remove the following references:
      • Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Avatar
      • Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Net
      • Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Storage
      • Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Video
      • Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Xact
    2. Create a new blank Windows Phone Game project and go to the Properties folder.
    3. Copy the files AppManifest.xml and WindowsPhoneManifest.xml from the new blank Windows Phone Game project into the Properties folder.
    4. Edit WindowsPhoneManifest.xml and update the following values:
      • Update the ProductID value to match the GUID that is listed for the assembly GUID in AssemblyInfo.cs
      • Update the Title to match the AssemblyTitle in AssemblyInfo.cs
  3. Xbox® 360® Game project templates are included but not supported in the preview release of XNA Game Studio 4.0.
    The preview release of XNA Game Studio 4.0 that is included with Microsoft Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP includes project templates for Xbox 360 games and game libraries. Developers can create and build Xbox 360 game and Xbox 360 game library projects using the preview release of XNA Game Studio 4.0, but these projects cannot deploy or run.
  4. Unable to add the same content project to both a Game and Game Library in the same solution.
    If a game project references a game library project in the same solution, and both projects reference the same content project, you will receive the following build error:
    Unable to copy file {filename}
    This occurs because content is deleted from the output folder when a game and a referenced game library both contain a content reference to the same content project. To work around this issue, you can remove the reference to the content project from either the game or game library.

Windows Phone Deployment and Debugging in XNA Game Studio

  1. XNA Game Studio will check for a DirectX 10 or later graphics card with a WDDM 1.1 driver before deploying to the Windows Phone Emulator. If the graphics card does not support DirectX 10 or later, the following message will be displayed in the error window of Visual Studio:
    Deploy failed with the following error: The current display adapter does not meet the emulator requirements to run XNA Framework applications.
    The DirectX Caps Viewer Tool can be used to determine if a graphics card supports DirectX 10 or later and if a WDDM 1.1 driver is installed. This tool is available for download via DirectX SDK.
    To determine if a graphics card supports DirectX 10 or later:
    1. In the DirectX Caps Viewer, expand the DXGI 1.1 Devices folder, and then expand the next level folder for the video card. Under this folder, you will see folders for Direct3D® 10, Direct3D 10.1, and the like.
    2. Expand the Direct3D 10.1 folder and look at the Feature Level entry. In this folder, you will see an entry for D3D10_FEATURE_LEVEL_10_0 or D3D10_FEATURE_LEVEL_10_1 if the graphics card supports DirectX 10 or later. If the Feature Level indicates a feature level of 9_n or less, it cannot support the Direct3D of the Windows Phone Emulator.
    If you see this error message and your graphics card is DirectX 10-capable as reported by the DirectX Caps Viewer Tool, you should refer to the Web site for the manufacturer of the graphics card to see if a newer driver is available.
    On Windows Vista® SP2, the 4 updates that are a part of KB 971644 are also required to support deployment to the Windows Phone Emulator.
    The following updates referenced in KB 971644 are required for Windows Vista x86-based systems:
    The following updates referenced in KB 971644 are required for Windows Vista x64-based systems:
  2. Windows Phone Games do not display in the Windows Phone Emulator application list after deploying to the emulator.
    Windows Phone Games will display in the Games Hub on a Windows Phone. However, the Games Hub is turned off by default in the Windows Phone Emulator. As a workaround, if you need to launch a Windows Phone game outside of a debugging session, you can change the Genre value of the Windows Phone Manifest to display the game in the application list.
    To set view the Windows Phone Game in the application list, open \Properties\WindowsPhoneManifest.xml and change the Genre value in the App element from "Apps.Games" to "NormalApp".
  3. Unable to start program error if project not configured to build or deploy.
    If a project is not configured to build and or deploy a game, these operations will fail with the following error message:
    Unable to start program '\Windows\taskhost.exe'. The drive cannot locate a specific area or track on the disk.
    To set a game project to build or deploy:
    1. In Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, click Tools, then click Settings, then click Expert Settings to enable the Solution Configurations drop-down.
    2. From the Solution Configurations drop-down in the standard toolbar, select Configuration Manager.
    3. Verify that the check boxes for Build and Deploy are checked for your Windows Phone Game project.
  4. Build and Deploy options such as F5 do not work if an XNA Game Studio 4.0 project is set to Any CPU configuration.
    If a C# content project has no build configuration specified, the default setting is Debug|Any CPU. A Debug|Any CPU build configuration will be created if a .suo fie is deleted. To resolve this issue, set the project build configuration to Windows Phone.
  5. Deployment fails if the assembly GUID does not match the ProductID value in the Windows Phone manifest.
    If the assembly GUID in Properties\AssemblyInfo.cs does not match the ProductID value in the App element in Properties\WindowsPhoneManifest.xml, deployment will fail with the following error:
    The specified package cannot be opened or contains an invalid manifest or signature.
    Make sure that the assembly GUID in Properties\AssemblyInfo.cs matches the ProductID value in the App element in Properties\WindowsPhoneManifest.xml
  6. Deployment fails if a game thumbnail is not copied to the output directory.
    If Copy to Output Directory is not set to Copy always for the game thumbnail, game deployment will fail with the following error:
    Value does not fall within the expected range
    To resolve this issue, click on the game thumbnail and set Copy to Output Directory to Copy always.

XNA Framework

  1. Keyboard input is not supported on the Windows Phone Emulator.
  2. The MediaLibrary class is not supported on Windows Phone Emulator.
    The Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Media.MediaLibrary class is not supported for the Windows Phone Emulator included with the Microsoft Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP Refresh. If accessed from Windows Phone Emulator, the MediaLibrary instance will always behave as an empty library and SavePicture will throw a InvalidOperationException.
  3. Password mode is not supported for keyboard input.
    If the UsePasswordMode parameter of Guide.BeginShowKeyboardInput is set to true, this value is ignored, and will behave as though the value were set to false. Characters that are typed will be displayed in the input area.
  4. GamerServices functionality is not supported.
    Gamer services are not available for the preview release of XNA Game Studio 4.0. Most methods and properties in the Microsoft.Xna.GamerServices namespace will return default values if called.
  5. VertexElementFormat.Byte4 not supported on Windows Phone Emulator.
    The vertex element format, VertexElementFormat.Byte4, is not supported in the version of the Windows Phone Emulator in Microsoft Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP. Models may render incorrectly if they use model processors that utilize this vertex element format.
    To work around this issue, you can specify a different vertex element format, such as VertexElementFormat.Vector4. You can override the ProcessVertexChannel method of your ModelProcessor and use ConvertChannelContent to use a different vertex format.
    protected override void ProcessVertexChannel(GeometryContent geometry, int vcIndex, ContentProcessorContext context)
            {
            string channelName = geometry.Vertices.Channels[vertexChannelIndex].Name;

            base.ProcessVertexChannel(geometry, vertexChannelIndex, context);

            if (channelName == "Weights0")
            geometry.Vertices.Channels.ConvertChannelContent<Vector4>("BlendIndices0");
            }

Scenarios Not Supported

  • Opening Windows Phone projects in Expression Blend® is not supported, except for Expression Blend 4 Beta with “MICROSOFT EXPRESSION BLEND ADD-IN PREVIEW FOR WINDOWS PHONE.”
  • Round-trip editing of the Windows Phone projects between Expression Blend and Visual Studio is not supported.
  • Windows XP and Windows Server® are not supported.
  • Virtual PC and Hyper-V™ are not supported.

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