VS 2010 Express for Windows Phone provides a rich development environment for building great phone applications.

Using File->New Project, you can choose from several Silverlight for Windows Phone starter templates when creating new projects.  Today’s release adds support for new Panormana and Pivot controls and associated project templates that you can use to create applications that take advantage of these new Windows Phone 7 metaphors:

Selecting the “Panorama Application” template above will cause VS to create a fully working Silverlight for Windows Phone application that uses the Panorama UI metaphor (and the new Silverlight Panorama control):

Visual Studio provides a WYSIWYG design-surface (with split-view support for XAML source) for building phone applications using Silverlight.  It also provides full code intellisense, debugger and developer tool support.

You can choose to deploy and debug an application on a physical phone device - or alternatively within a built-in phone emulator.  Below is a screen-shot of the above application running inside the built-in emulator and being debugged by Visual Studio:

The phone emulator is hardware accelerated, and optionally supports multi-touch monitors (enabling you to easily simulate finger gestures).