Microsoft seems to be giving developers a lot of good reasons to start developing apps for the new platform.   One that stands out immediately is that developing any and all applications for Windows Phone will always be free, and Microsoft will provide the best tools possible for the job.  One great feature of Windows Phone is the ability to run Silverlight 4.  The version that will be run on Windows Phone devices, will be the same exact version that is running on desktops.  There won’t be any shortcuts when it comes to this.  What that means is that XNA and Silverlight will be 100% hardware accelerated and games will support full 3D Environments.  The XNA tools used  by current Windows and Xbox game developers will be the same used for Windows Phone, and will allow the release of games onto Windows Phone devices with very minimal changes being made to the games.  Another plus of imposing Silverlight on developers, is that the thousands of developers already using this tool are more then ready to start producing Windows Phone applications.  Silverlight is steadily growing, and crossing over to other platforms, which should provide some pretty incredible application releases when we actually get our hands on a Windows Phone device.  Something to think about regarding the Silverlight 4 release, is that it is completely backwards compatible with Silverlight 3.  Since it is clear Windows Phone devices will initially be released running an enhanced version of Silverlight 3, current developers will be able to implement their existing Silverlight code into the Silverlight 4 program.

It seems with the release of the the Developer Tools by Microsoft, that they are taking a step in the right direction.  That direction seems to be directly towards Apple and not only taking on the current applications available to the iPhone, but blowing them out of the water.  With a full emulator allowing multi-touch in development testing (if tested on a Windows 7 computer with multi-touch capabilities) and the ability to deploy and debug within the emulator or directly on a Windows Phone device, all the tools are there.  The question is what will the developers do with them?