Next week I’m going ReMIX Atlanta to attend the Windows Phone 7 track. I want to be ahead of the curve on this one, as I feel that Microsoft finally has a phone that can compete in the mobile market. Of course, I’m not depending on one conference to make me a Windows Phone 7 expert, but the tools I previously downloaded stopped working when I installed the RTM of Visual Studio 2010.

Via Tim Heur, I’ve discovered that a compatible version of the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP has been released! It includes XNA Game Studio 4.0 CTP. Having the tools doesn’t do you much good without a training kit, so it would be wise to download it and go through it. There’s even a handy programming guide when you get stuck.

If you’re a designer, you should check out the Expression Blend SDK Preview 2 for Windows Phone and the Expression Blend Add-in Preview 2 for Windows Phone. You need Expression Blend 4 RC for these to work. Check out the Application Bar Icons for a consistent look and feel.

It appears as though the Reactive Extensions will be useful for Windows Phone. There are two articles on MSDN right now on using Rx: one on using the accelerometer data and another on the location data. LINQ to Events is pretty useful when you want to react to your device.

Roger Peters has a series of screencasts on Creating a Windows 7 Metro Style Pivot Application. No phone is complete without a twitter application, and the man in red shows us how it’s done.

The Metro UI seems to be pretty popular; someone even created a Firefox theme based on it.

There are tons of resources for us developers to jump in and make some awesome apps ahead of the release of the hardware. The marketplace is wide open… happy coding!