Windows Phone 7 Dev Deployment

Recently, I’ve been playing around with the Windows Phone 7 Developer experience.  Quick tip: I tried to deploy my application to the phone, and got an error: “Zune software is not launched. Retry after making sure that Zune software is launched.”  This wasn’t particularly helpful for me since I did have the software launched, and my phone was connected through wireless sync (didn’t remember this at the time). 

A quick search turned up nothing, and restarting the client didn’t help.  But then I remembered my setup and plugged my phone straight into the USB port and then had no problems.

Thinking about it, I wouldn’t expect this scenario to work, but there was no indication of this provided to me as a devt.

A couple of takeaways as a tester and geek:

1. Bad error messages cause customers a lot of pain.  Fighting for these in triage is probably worth your time.

2. Wired > Wireless, even in 2011 :)