In a previous article, I’ve make a preview about the new Visual Studio 2010 features and drawbacks. One of the key drawbacks is that Smart Devices is no more supported in Visual Studio 2010.

Some people think that Microsoft is going to build a standalone IDE for Smart Devices including Windows CE and Windows Mobile applications like major competitors in this field “Apple and Google” who released free IDEs for development of both iPhone and Android applications respectively. Those thoughts were confirmed after the release of a public beta of Microsoft’s main development IDE, Visual Studio 2010 in the last week. Microsoft did not include Smart Devices programmability features in all supported languages in Visual Studio 2010, which was a bad news for smart devices developers when they found that out, especially for Windows Embedded developers which became very certain that Visual Studio will no more work with BSPs after much complaints of forcing most of Embedded developers who upgraded to Visual Studio 2008 to stick back to Visual Studio 2005 since VS 2008 and WinCE 6.0 were not compatible.

The good news that Microsoft Windows Embedded team is not intending to build its standalone IDE for Windows Embedded and Windows Mobile development. They’re working with Visual Studio team in order to find a solution for Smart Device programmability options in Visual Studio 2010.

Hoping to see Smart Devices back in next builds of Visual Studio 2010!