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Microsoft's Windows Phone Developer Tools are final, and released to the Web. Developers hoping to create apps for the company's upcoming smartphone platform will need to download this newest version of the tools.

Twitter, Netflix, OpenTable, Flixster and Travelocity will be some of the higher-profile companies with apps available for Windows Phone 7 upon the platform's release. In order to build an app storefront capable of competing against Apple's App Store and Google's Android Marketplace, though, Microsoft is encouraging third-party developers to begin designing for Windows Phone 7.

"Any application built with a previous version of the tools will fail application certification in the Marketplace," Brandon Watson, Microsoft's director of developer experience for Windows Phone 7, wrote in a Sept. 16 posting on The Windows Phone Developer Blog. "When you do submit your application, you can expect it to take about five days to pass or fail certification, though you can check the status of your app submission at any time at the developer portal."

The developer-tools download includes Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone, the Windows Phone Emulator, Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone and XNA Game Studio 4.0. It's only available in English at the moment, although French, Italian, German and Spanish are expected to be available in the next few weeks.

Last year, Microsoft executives publicly announced a target of 600 apps at launch for Windows Mobile 6.5. They missed. This time around, the company remains tight-lipped about the number of apps it expects for Windows Phone 7.

"We're really focused on quality; we have pretty lofty aspirations," Watson told eWEEK in a Sept. 15 interview. "We have to show developers that they can build applications, that they can make money. So we're really focused on the quality of the applications." Microsoft has specific internal targets for the size of its app storefront, he said, but will keep those under wraps.