Over the last year I have spent a lot of time talking about Windows Phone 7 development, both at (international) conferences, for students and at companies. During these presentations I always used a significant part of my speaking time to show Visual Studio 2010 in action. Live coding is something I like to do, and definitely helps showing an audience how powerful the development tools for Windows Phone 7 application development are. One question I got frequently was to show the applications I already had published on the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace. Up until now I have not really been interested in publishing Windows Phone 7 applications, teaching folks how to develop these applications is just more fun for me. However, over the last couple of weeks I decided to create a simple application for publication on Marketplace. Even though simple, the application is making use of MVVM instead of making use of code behind files. Making use of MVVM helped testing the application and definitely increases maintainability. To my surprise, getting the application certified and published was a very simple process. It was just a matter of submitting my (obfuscated) XAP file, some artwork, screen shots and a description. A few more details needed to be filled out on the submission pages, like a category under which the application will be visible on Marketplace, the price for the application and support for Trial mode. All in all, submitting the application took less then 15 minutes. After some waiting time (which can vary between a couple of hours and a few working days), I got an email, indicating successful submission to Marketplace. This process is easy and fast. Funny enough, it also made me feel good to see my own application available on Marketplace. I really start getting excited about submitting Windows Phone 7 applications. Just wait and see. I am pretty sure I will get more applications out to Marketplace. Oh, just in case you are curious: You can find my first ever published Windows Phone 7 application by clicking on this link to Marketplace. Note: This link will work from a Windows Phone 7, or from a PC with Zune software installed.
