Microsoft updates its Windows Phone Mango SDK Beta 2

LATE TO THE PARTY mobile software house Microsoft has released an updated version of its software development kit (SDK) for its Windows Phone 7 (WP7) Mango operating system.

After "positive feedback" from developers Microsoft has admitted that developers require tools for more complicated builds. It hopes to achieve this with a month's worth of work on the SDK 7.1 Beta 2.

The Windows Phone Developer Blog said, "Starting this morning, you can download the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 'Beta 2 Refresh' from the 'Mango' Connect site."

Some of the important changes include that application programming interfaces are now locked and you can now take screenshots of your applications. The profiler has been 'greatly improved', you can install the developer package, Nuget, and the refresh includes a sneak peek at the Marketplace test kit.

If that bit of mouth watering news wasn't enough the blog has also announced an update to the Microsoft Update servers. The blog said this will allow you to refresh retail Windows Phones that developers have updated to Mango over the last month.

This update is 'Build 7712' which matches the SDK release. This is not to be confused with the release to manufacturing (RTM) build of Mango that we wrote about yesterday, as it is just a pre-release build.

Giving a couple of reasons why it's not providing the RTM build, the blog said, "The phone OS and the tools are two equal parts of the developer toolkit that correspond to one another. When we took this snapshot for the refresh, we took the latest RC drops of the tools and the corresponding OS version."

"Second, what we are providing is a genuine release candidate build, with enough code checked in and APIs locked down that this OS is close enough to RTM that, as a developer, it's more than capable to see you through the upcoming RC drop of the tools and app submission." µ