Republished with Permission - Original
Article
Earlier today we shipped the beta of the Windows Phone 7 Developer
Tools. You can download them here.

What is included in the Windows Phone Developer Tools
The Windows Phone Developer Tools Beta includes:
Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone – a new free,
express edition of Visual Studio 2010
Express Blend for Windows Phone – a new free, edition of
Blend focused on Windows Phone 7 development
Silverlight for Windows Phone 7
XNA Game Studio for Windows Phone 7
Integrated with the development tools is a phone emulator
that enables you to easily develop and test Windows Phone 7 applications on
your laptop or desktop machine – without requiring a phone device. It is
hardware accelerated, supports multi-touch events on multi-touch capable monitors,
and provides a really easy way to debug and try out your phone applications.
Devices for Developers
In addition to testing applications within the emulator, we
are also this month starting to ship pre-release phones to developers.
You can learn more about this program and sign-up to receive one from this blog post from the Windows Phone 7 team.