It feels like only a couple of weeks since the initial Windows Phone 7 tools release back in February… or was it march? (time is going too fast recently) but inline with promises about quick iterations the New Windows Phone 7 tools have been refreshed you can download the tools from here: http://developer.windowsphone.com

One of the major things this release enables is phone development in the latest version of Visual studio 2010 , which is great news for anyone that installed the release of VS2010 3 weeks ago only to realise that they could no longer build phone apps.

As you would expect the tools refresh also updates the operating system of the Windows Phone Emulator so you will get all the latest bug fixes for the phone.

If you have tried to do anything with launchers or choosers and noticed that the previous tools  didn’t support the APIs you be glad to hear they do now, although some of the experiences for the choosers are limited, for example with the email chooser there are no contacts on the emulator and currently no way to add one, the new support is preferable to the previous error messages you would receive when you attempted to launch an unsupported chooser.

There are a number of of other fixes but predominantly the release ensures we can develop Phone applications in Visual Studio 2010  which in turn means you can use all your add-ons like ReSharper.