The first thing I noticed after installing the newly distributed Visual Studio 2011 is it does not bring the windows phone SDK pre-packaged as you can see silverlight for windows phone template is not installed there.

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I tried downloading again the SDK as I have a Visual studio 2010 running on the same machine and probably it was only installed for that particular version.

To my surprise I noticed it didn’t work as expected and it only refreshed the VS2010 templates for silverlight, I just dug a little bit more and found out the following reference on the official windows blog:

“The Windows Phone SDK and Visual Studio “11” Beta

Many folks have also noticed that the new preview release of next version of Visual Studio (the “Visual Studio 11 Beta”, available here) does not include support for developing Windows Phone applications. Rest assured, there absolutely will be support for building Windows Phone applications with the next version of Visual Studio by the time it RTMs. Prior to that, per the first point above, we will be enabling the Windows Phone SDK 7.1 on Windows 8 in the coming months”

This means we should continue working on Visual studio 2010 for a while when referring to windows phone development. Personally think the new improvements on visual studio 11 are great but this is somehow a step back from a developer-new-technology-penetration-point-of-view, hopefully they will fix this in no time for VS11 and Windows 8