With Symbian and MeeGo casualties of the brave new world of Nokia's Window Phone future, developers will also have to get used to new tools.

During 2010, Nokia spent a lot of time and money promoting its cross platform Qt development environment, which enables content for Symbian, MeeGo and PC.

Qt will continue for Symbian, but developers looking to work on Nokia smartphones will now have to switch to Microsoft's tools such as Visual Studio 2010 and Expression, using Silverlight for applications or the C#-based XNA Framework for games.

New tricks

Yet, with most developers of Windows Phone 7 content praising the development environment, this shouldn't be too much of a problem, as well as enabling studios to easily port such developed games to PC and Xbox 360.

Guidance will also be provided for developers wishing to port Qt applications to Windows Phone.

Nokia's developer support organisation Forum Nokia will continue, but only for legacy Symbian platforms. It will be part of Nokia's new Services and Developer Experiences unit, which will handle Windows Phone support, together with Microsoft.