Available: Windows Phone SDK 7.1 RC with ‘Go Live’ license for publishing apps on Windows Phone Marketplace

Windows Phone SDK 7.1 RC is now live on the Download Center and the Marketplace is able to ingest WP7.5 apps.
This release represents a large step for the platform, the Release Candidate (RC) build empowers the developer to not only develop their Windows Phone 7.5 apps, but it also includes a ‘Go Live’ license that empowers them to publish to Marketplace. The RC release continues to work fine with the pre-release builds of Zune and Windows Phone 7.5 that Microsoft released last month (build 7712).

Main resources:

• Download Windows Phone SDK 7.1 RC
• Windows Phone SDK 7.1 RC direct download links:
  ENU Web Installer: https://download.microsoft.com/download/A/5/1/A51C88B5-CF00-420C-9288-020CCD6C65C8/vm_web2.exe
  ENU ISO Image: https://download.microsoft.com/download/A/5/1/A51C88B5-CF00-420C-9288-020CCD6C65C8/WPSDKV71_en1.iso
• Windows Phone SDK 7.1 RC documentation
  • What’s New in Windows Phone Developer Tools: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=190409 
  • Code Samples for Windows Phone: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=219604

This new release includes a lot of improvements including:

• The emulator is using the RTM Build (7720) and the profiler have couple enhancements to make development and testing better.
• NuGet is now supported in the free Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone SKU
• Marketplace Test Kit enables you to test your app for certification on your machine. Moreover with the‘Go Live’ license included in the WPSDK 7.1 RC you can publish your apps to the Windows Phone Marketplace. If you built your app using the WPSDK 7.1 Beta 2 Refresh released last month, it should be as simple as a recompile and test.

To finish off, I just stumbled upon this interesting post by Shawn Wildermuth: Maintaining a Project with Two Windows Phone Versions. Worth checking out.

Happy ‘Mango’ coding!