So I wanted to develop for the Windows Phone 7 device. I started humble, reading and understanding any source of information. I've studied a lot of MIX conferences, blogs, webcasts and attended Microsoft workshops. After some time I got the opportunity of having a device. Naturally, I wanted to deploy my applications on the device, having a proof that they work as they were supposed to. But this wasn’t so easy!
This is my experience about registering on the Marketplace.
1. Register: Given the fact that Microsoft offers free access for students to the Marketplace, I registered myself as developer with my LiveId. But this is not enough to publish applications. You must first get authenticated that you are who you claim to be. This is not done by Microsoft, but by a 3rd party company which specializes in authentication – GeoTrust. And if this sounds familiar to you, might be because they also sell SSL certificates.
2. Build In order to start the authentication process, you have to add a application to Market place. In my case I created a simple application based on Single Page Application template.I added a button on which Click handler I set the phone to vibrate for short time. Be careful to give it a meaningful name, maybe you’ll continue the application and transform it into a big hit later.
In this step, you should also create some media files for application artwork – required are 4 files : 3 PNG application icons with sizes: 173 x 173px (Large mobile app icon), 99 x 99px (Small mobile app icon), 200 x 200px (Large PC app icon) and at least one screenshot of your app running with the size of 480 x 800px.
3. Publish I logged on Marketplace with my LiveId account and added a new application – be careful to name the just added application as your already built app. Upload the image files and setup pricing. One developer can have just a small number of free apps, so be careful with free ones. When you hit the submit button, your application is created on Microsoft server, but will not be sent to be verified! You have to set its status to Verification.
4. Authentication Now it is the tricky part – you have to wait for the GeoTrust representatives to contact you for asking you some personal data in order to figure out if you’re the developer you claim to be. In my case, after 7 days of waiting I contacted them on their live chat and one nice guy helped me to finish the process in less than 3 hours. Why less? Because you have to fill a form, scan your ID and send the scanned pictures by e-mail. After this, I contacted them again on chat and the same nice guy confirmed me that everything was ok after some more clarifications. The issue was that I live now in Germany and he asked for a German Id, but since Romania is part of European Union, my Romanian passport was good too!
5. Microsoft Confirmation – Later on that evening, I received the confirmation from GeoTrust that I was authenticated correctly and this was followed by Microsoft confirmation that I can use the device to test my application.
The only thing remained is that my application that I uploaded to get certified It was uploaded on 17th of November and now it is 27th and unfortunately it didn’t complete the tests yet.
That was my story, I hope you’ll find it useful!
