Windows Phone Developer Tools for building Mango applications will be available for free next month, featuring improved emulator capabilities, including location simulation. Profiling support in the tools allows developers to identify hot spots in an application and pinpoint problems. "It'll actually walk you through the code that you need to fix in order to address them," Guthrie said. Also, a memory allocation capability tracks objects based on how much memory is being allocated.

As had been expected, Microsoft also announced plug in platform described by Guthrie as being for "premium" experiences. Support for Silverlight 5 in Microsoft's Visual Studio and Expression Studio tools is also available.

Version 5, which is due to reach the release-to-manufacturing stage later this year, includes such capabilities as Hardware Video Decode, for enhanced video quality, and an XNA-based interface for 3D visualizations within applications. Release-to-manufacturing generally means the product will be available shortly thereafter. The beta release is available at .

in InfoWorld's Mobile Technology Channel.