This Windows Phone 7 SDK has been released this week and I must say that I am impressed and disappointed at the same time. Let’s start with the positive things:

• WP7 applications use Silverlight 4, which is a great and elegant programming model.
• A WP7 simulator is included which works fast and easy.
• The SDK fully integrates in VS2010.NET

The negatives:

• It uses a subset of Silverlight 4, which lacks a lot of functionality (at this moment?). Even a simple DockPanel is not available (although this is easy to implement).
• No local database support. There are some open-source solutions, but I would rather use something like SQL-Server for Mobile.

The programming model is much better than Apple’s Cocoa Touch framework. Silverlight is much more elegant compared to the ancient Objective-C stuff that Cocoa Touch uses. The drawback is that Apple’s system is more mature. You can access a standard database and it ships which better controls than WP7 does. Maybe things get better before WP7 ships, but there is still a lot of work to do for Microsoft.