The Application Development and Publishing Life Cycle

When you create an application for Windows Phone 7, you can publish it on Windows Marketplace to make it available to users. The overall process involves interaction with both the Windows Phone 7 developer portal and the Window Marketplace portal. Figure 1 shows a high-level view of the stages of building and publishing an application for Windows Phone 7.

After you create, test, and debug your application using the tools available from the App Hub, you can register as a vendor and upload your application to the App Hub. As part of this process, you must create an account and verify your identity to obtain a publisher certificate.

After you complete the registration process, you can submit your application. After it passes the validation and certifi cation stages, it is signed with your publisher certifi cate and published to the Windows Marketplace application warehouse.

The Marketplace hub on the phone allows users to purchase your application, download it, and install it on their phones. As mentioned earlier, you can also create and publish trial versions of your application. The App Hub provides analysis of downloads, sales information, and user ratings. In addition, you can manage your application and update it (by deploying a new version) as required.

Note: Users can also find and buy your Windows Phone 7 application by using Zune software on their computers. For more information about finding and buying Windows Phone 7 applications, see “Find and buy apps in Marketplace” (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en-us/howto/wp7/apps/find-and-buy-apps-in-marketplace.aspx).

The following sections of this chapter describe the requirements and processes for publishing your applications on Windows Phone Marketplace. For more information about the development platform and application life cycle, see the previous chapters of this book and “Application Platform Overview for Windows Phone” on MSDN® (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff402531(VS.92).aspx).

For more information about creating trial versions of your applications, see Appendix A, “Creating Trial Applications for Windows Phone” on MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff967554(VS.92).aspx).

The home page for App Hub is http://create.msdn.com/.