Announcing TouchDevelop v2.0 beta: script sharing in the cloud

Today, the TouchDevelop team is thrilled to announce a big step forward in mobile programming: TouchDevelop v2.0 for Windows Phone 7 enables easy sharing of scripts. To reflect the big change, we are renaming the app to TouchDevelop; we secured the new, short domain name touchdevelop.com, which serves as a hub for all your scripts.

You can install the latest version directly via Zune; you might have to wait a few hours before the latest TouchDevelop version becomes available in your marketplace.

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Script Sharing in the Cloud

It was never easier to create a little app and share it with other people: After you log in with your Windows Live ID, or Facebook account, you will notice that all of the scripts you create or modify have a little upload button next to them.

When you click on the upload button, you can reconsider the name of your script, but it’s really just one more button click to get your script published on the script bazaar.

Script bazaar – reviews, screenshots, leaderboard

The script bazaar is a place in the cloud where all the published TouchDevelop are stored. You can view and find scripts via the touchdevelop.com website, or via the script bazaar that is integrated into the TouchDevelop app.

You can find, install, and review scripts in the bazaar just like you are used to for regular apps.

What’s cool about the script bazaar is that it makes it really easy to connect with other people: You can not only write reviews, but you can also submit new screenshots directly from a running script, and there is a common leaderboard where you see how your game score compares to other people.

Better Scripts

To customize your scripts for the script bazaar, you can choose your own script name, custom script colors and icons (from billybarker.net).

When you write a script, you can see which capabilities it uses, for example that it takes a picture with the camera of our phone, and that it shares information by posting to Facebook. Before you install a script from the bazaar, we tell you which capabilities it may use, and how your private information may flow out from your phone.

When you run a script for the first time, you can choose to withhold your actual private information from a script that you just found on the bazaar and run it with anonymized information instead.

You can read in more detail how TouchDevelop helps you to manage access to your private information by scripts.

Better Editor

We made many improvements to the TouchDevelop editor:

You can now select multiple statements, and perform refactorings such as surrounding statements with another control-flow structure, or extracting them into a separate method.

We also built a better prediction engine to fill the intelli-buttons when you enter expressions. When you tap on orange error messages, warnings or suggestions in the expression editor, then TouchDevelop can often automatically fix them for you.

New name and new website: touchdevelop.com

This new version represents a big step forward by enabling script sharing in the cloud; so we not only changed the version number to 2, but we also secured the new short domain name touchdevelop.com, so all of the scripts you create will get a short URLs such as touchdevelop.com/gdmr (a bubble pop game). You can share these URLs with other people. On a script’s website, you can see reviews, screenshots, the leaderboard, and you can even install it on your Windows Phone 7 from the website.

Many other improvements

See the Release Notes for details of the new features and APIs, and also a list of breaking API changes.