Windows Phone 7 Highlights - Visual Search and Prism

The Windows Phone and Bing teams have announced a visual search gallery for Windows Phone 7 apps in the US and UK.  This tool makes it very easy to find and discover the growing catalog of apps for Windows Phone 7.  Apps can be filtered along 16 categories, 25 subcategories, and price.  Once you find an app, click on it for more information and ultimately a link into Zune Marketplace where you can download the app to your PC and phone.

Click through to see the new Bing Visual Search Gallery for Windows Phone 7 apps.

For developers familiar with Prism, the patterns and practices have released an update that supports Windows Phone 7.  What is Prism?  Prism provides guidance designed to help you more easily design and build rich, flexible, and easy to maintain Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) desktop applications and Silverlight Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and Windows Phone 7 applications. Using design patterns that embody important architectural design principles, such as separation of concerns and loose coupling, Prism helps you to design and build applications using loosely coupled components that can evolve independently but which can be easily and seamlessly integrated into the overall application. Such applications are known as often referred to as composite applications.

Download Prism 4.0 with Windows Phone 7 support here, and find out more  information on the Prism home page.