Switching between Windows Phone 7.1 Mango and 7.0 RTW developer tools and vice versa

by WindowsPhoneGeek

In this post I am going to talk about how to switch between Windows Phone 7.1(Mango) and Windows Phone 7.0 RTW Developer Tools and vice versa, when building your WP7 Apps.

To begin with lets first mention that the latest update of the Windows Phone 7.1 Developer Tools(Mango) supports version 7.1 and 7.0 as well. So you can choose whether to develop a WP 7.1 Mango app or to build a standard windows phone 7.0 app that can be published on the Marketplace.

Note that you still can not publish "Mango" apps, but probably you want to try the "cool" new features that comes with "Mango". If you upgrade your app to "7.1" you will probably want to revert it back to WP 7.0 so that it can be published on the Marketplace, that is why switching between 7.0 and 7.1 of the tools and vice versa could be an option. However, there are several problems that you will need to handle whenever try to switch between these two version of the dev tools.

NOTE: Before we begin make sure that you have installed the Windows Phone Developer Tools 7.1 Beta(Mango).

Changing the Target Windows Phone Version from 7.0 to 7.1 (upgrade your project to "Mango")

This is the easiest scenario. Lets say that we have a WP7 project build with Windows Phone 7.0 official RTW tools developer tools and want to upgrade it to Windows Phone 7.1 Beta(Mango) tools.

Basically you have two options either to use the VisualStudio designer or to edit the VisualStudio project on your own.

Option1: Using the VisualStudio Designer:

Step1: Right click the target project file in VisualStudio and select "Properties":

Step2: Go to "Target Windows Phone Version" combo and select the "Windows Phone 7.1" option:

Step3: Read carefully the warning and press "Yes" button. Note that this will upgrade all the project to the new 7.1 version!

Option2: Edit the VisualStudio Project file:

Step1: Right click the project file in VisualStudio and select "Unload Project":

Step2: Right click the project file and select "Edit .."

NOTE: WP7MangoTest is the name of our project, in your case change the name to the desired one!

Step3: Find the line with "TargetFrameworkProfile" element and set its value from "WindowsPhone" to "WindowsPhone71"!

<TargetFrameworkProfile>WindowsPhone71</TargetFrameworkProfile>

Step4: After that go to the VisualStudio project file, right click and select "Reload Project". Click "Yse" button from the message box so that the changes will be reflected and the file will be successfully updated.

Step5. That is all you need to do. You are now working with Windows Phone 7.1 Beta (Mango) version. Just build and run the project.

Changing the Target Windows Phone Version from 7.1 to 7.0

This is the more complex scenario because not everything is working as expected and you will have to make some additional settings on your own. Lets say that we have a WP7 project build with Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) tools developer tools and want to revert it back to Windows Phone 7.0 RTW tools.

The first strange thing here is that you can not use the VisualStudio Designer in order to switch back to Windows Phone 7.0. If you right click the ProjectFile and select properties (ProjectFile->Properties) you will see that under "Target Windows Phone Version" the only available value is "Windows Phone 7.1"! So the previously described Option1 above is not an option here because "Windows Phone 7.0" version seems to be missing.

Fortunately you can still switch back to Windows Phone 7.0 by editing the VisualStudio Project file. But unfortunately this is still not enough. So you will have to follow the steps:

Step1: Right click the project file in VisualStudio and select "Unload Project":

Step2: Right click the project file and select "Edit .."

NOTE: WP7MangoTest is the name of our project, in your case change the name to the desired one!

Step3: Find the line with "TargetFrameworkProfile" element and set its value from "WindowsPhone71" to "WindowsPhone"!

<TargetFrameworkProfile>WindowsPhone</TargetFrameworkProfile>

Step4: After that go to the VisualStudio project file, right click and select "Reload Project". Click "Yse" button from the message box so that the changes will be reflected and the file will be successfully updated.

Step5: If you try to build the project you will notice the following exception:

"Error 1    The 'AppPlatformVersion' attribute is invalid - The value '7.1' is invalid according to its datatype 'http://schemas.microsoft.com/windowsphone/2009/deployment:ST_AppPlatformVersion' - The Enumeration constraint failed. "

Step6: To fix this you will have to "WMAppManifest.xml" file and change the AppPlatformVersion from "7.1" to "7.0":

Step7. That is all you need to do. You are now working with Windows Phone 7.0 RTW version. Just build and run the project.

UPDATE: If you have the following code in your WMAppManifest.xml then you need to remove it:

<Capability Name="ID_CAP_ISV_CAMERA">
<Capability Name="ID_CAP_CONTACTS">
<Capability Name="ID_CAP_APPOINTMENTS">

That was all about how to switch between Windows Phone 7.0 and Windows Phone 7.1 and vise versa, when building your windows phone applications. Here is the sample project:

I hope that the post was helpful.

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Comments

<Capability Name="ID_CAP_ISV_CAMERA">
<Capability Name="ID_CAP_CONTACTS">
<Capability Name="ID_CAP_APPOINTMENTS">