In an announcement today, Microsoft’s Phone Developer Blog has mentioned that developers are now able to use Visual Basic to write apps for Windows Phone 7. Windows Phone developers will be able to download a Community Technology Preview (CTP) version from Microsoft to get their teeth cut on the technology. Although it is a limited version of the eventual product, it will give Visual Basic developers more than enough resource to work with in order to get their groove on.

ReadWriteWeb has some commentary on the release and how it might affect the ecology of the Windows Phone,

For Microsoft’s developer community, this is big news. Previously the company had touted how “every .NET developer just became a Windows Phone developer” with Windows Phone 7 and how Silverlight and XNA developers would be “really happy” with the platform. However, Visual Basic support, which was non-existent until now, remained a top request.

As for Windows Phone 7 itself, our own Frederic Lardinois recently had some hands-on time with it and is excited about its potential. “After playing with the phone for a while, it is hard not come away impressed,” he said. “The interface is a nice departure from the standard smartphone UI we have become used to, with a lot of refinements a lot of us don’t usually expect to see out of Microsoft.”

Even before the announcement, Microsoft posted a tweet asking people what they hoped the next development for programmers might be—and in fact, Visual Basic implementations remained extremely popular. With such an array of eager developers it will probably be seeing a huge influx of apps written using the CTP Visual Basic platform, which should give the language a nice kick start. The tools within the CTP include templates, designer support, emulator (and phone!) support and IntelliSense for Visual Basic.

The new UI certainly has caught the appeal of various market segments, but it’ll still be a little while to see if the direction Microsoft is taking the new smartphone will work out for them. By opening up to a wider variety of developers they’ll be priming their own app ecosystem to become more competitive and that should work wonders for the phone—and perhaps, as soon as the full implementation comes out—it will look good for future Windows Phone products.

Since this is not the final implementation there are certain caveats released as well from the announcement on the Phone Developer Blog,

• This is a CTP, which means we want to give you early access, and are hoping to solicit feedback, but this is not a final implementation, and you should not expect anything you built to be commercial ready.
• There is no Go-Live license, which means you shouldn’t try to release apps built with this version of the technology.
• You need to be a Visual Studio 2010 Professional (or higher) customer. So if you only have the Express edition of the Windows Phone Developer Tools, you cannot use this version of the CTP. I hear Visual Studio 2010 have a trial download if you are really itchy.
• You cannot build XNA games. Silverlight apps only.

If you’re a Visual Basic developer or just interested in the package, you can download it from Microsoft.