I’m slowly improving my knowledge of developing in Silverlight and specifically apps for Windows Phone 7. My Internode Usage app has been out for almost a month, and I’m working on an update for that (including real Internode logos now that I’ve got permission). I’ve also been creating a new app that will display the nearest public toilet (particularly useful for parents of young kids, especially if you’re travelling). That’s been fun as I’ve got to use the Map control. I hope to publish that soon.

One thing I have missed was the ability to easily write unit tests for the code. The problem is that the code doesn’t run on your desktop, it runs in the emulator or on a device. This has meant that most of the solutions so far have relied on running the test runner on the device as a separate application. That is certainly a valid way to test, but getting the results of the test back out isn’t easy. Justin Angel describes one approach using the CoreCon API to read and write to the test app’s Isolated Storage. Another way might be to get the test runner app to push the results back out to some kind of HTTP listener running externally to the emulator.

Enter the Portable Library Tools add-in. Just released as a CTP, this allows code to be targeted at both Windows Phone 7 and the regular CLR (as well as Silverlight and XNA) without having to jump through lots of hoops.

It should now be possible to create a regular .NET unit testing assembly (say using MbUnit with the Gallio test runner) and run tests over most of your code, and then just recompile to have the same code be deployed to WP7.

There will be exceptions, as you may need to refactor your code to extract out specific WP7 dependencies (that obviously have no equivalent in the desktop .NET Framework), but this looks like a promising step forward.

One caveat is that to install the Portable Library Tools, you need to have installed VS 2010 SP1 Beta. I’m being more careful about keeping my work laptop (which has also become my main dev machine) in good working order, so I’ll be installing the SP1 beta on a separate VM just to be safe.

I’ll do a follow-up post with my experiences. It might take a few days, as tomorrow I’m off riding in the Tour Down Under (again!), and might need a day or two to recover!