There is a tremendous opportunity brewing for developers building Metro-styled applications that is almost unprecedented. How would you like to reach a target audience of more than 500-million users?!?! Windows Phone developers, are uniquely positioned to get in on the ground floor of Windows 8 and the Windows Store. You have been honing your skills building Windows Phone apps and setting yourself up for this evolution in Windows development.

The Windows Store is ramping up and with that, you have an opportunity as a developer to hit the ground running! Although the store isn’t officially open, we do have an opportunity to invite developers to submit their apps for review. To help developers gain the knowledge and guidance to bring their apps to Windows 8, we are sponsoring a number of Application Excellence Labs with the help of the Windows team. These are invite-only events.

You can follow these steps to get an invite to an App Excellence Lab in your area:

• Contact me for instructions on how I can nominate your app for an Excellence Lab
• Build a really great Windows 8 Metro-style app (or game) immediately. Get it as ready for release as if you were submitting to the store prior to the lab.

To help you along the way, here are a number of resources to help bring your Windows Phone app to Windows 8:

• Jared Bienz’s blog series on Windows Phone to Windows 8
• Migrating WP7 to Window 8
• Metro UX style, design and principles
• Creating your first Metro app with C#/XAML
• Samples and SDK

Additionally, my colleague, Jeff Brand, is running two online workshops to help Windows Phone developers migrate their apps to Windows 8:

Windows Phone to Windows 8 Online Workshop

These FREE half-day workshops will provide you an overview getting from Windows Phone to Windows 8.  Leveraging your XAML and .NET skills, these workshops will introduce the fundamentals of developing Windows 8 Metro-style applications, tips for migrating your Windows Phone applications, and guidance on Metro UX. Technical experts will be on hand to address your questions, discuss your existing Windows Phone applications, and help get you started on developing your applications on Windows 8 and getting them into the Windows Store.

Todd Brix recently highlighted some changes that developers and publishers need to be aware of with their apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace.

First, We now have 63 markets for you to publish your app in.  63!!! As the publisher, make sure you login to the AppHub and update the countries for which you would like your app(s) to be published in. AppHub will not do this automatically. It’s important that you keep an eye on when new Marketplaces open up so you can take advantage of this new markets and get your app out to more customers; equating, hopefully, to more revenue for you!

Second, the Zune desktop software will no longer offer the ability to browse and download apps from the Windows Phone Marketplace. This effects anyone who has a deep link posted somewhere that is pointing to the wrong service (zune://). Be sure to update your links with the correct format:

http://windowsphone.com/s?appid={YOUR APP GUID}

You can find more information on deep links on MSDN.

In addition, Todd outlines some changes the team is making to the Marketplace publishing policies to help keep up the quality bar of the Windows Phone Marketplace. These include:

• Avoid Trademarks: essentially if you don’t own a trademark, secure permission to use a trademark, or use a trademark name (not logo) to describe your app’s feature or functionality without suggesting the app is published by the trademark holder than don’t use do it.
• Raising the Quality Bar with Application Titles: if you publish multiple apps with the same common theme (ie. regional news, city guides, etc), be sure your application tile is unique across the apps to highlight the features of each individual app. A good rule of thumb to follow is to make sure your tile is 80% unique. You can use the remaining 20% to highlight your branding.

  VS.

• Keywords: the marketplace team is going to start enforcing the 5 keyword limit for each app. Keywords can be a single word or phrase (surrounded by quotes) and comma-separated. Any app violating the 5 keyword limit will have ALL of it’s keywords removed. Also, some apps are using keywords for popular search terms that are unrelated to their app. If this is encountered, that keyword will be removed.
• Content policy enforcement: there are some apps, some of which my wife and kids have encountered, that are of “questionable material”. Its difficult to enforce these types of things as some customers will view certain material as entertainment whereas others will view it as inappropriate. However, the Marketplace does have clear content policies defined and each publisher should make sure they understand those policies. Especially if you would like your app to reach into some of our additional new markets.

It’s your duty as a publisher to stay on top of the Windows Phone Developer Blog for any changes and announcements to help you be more successful in the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Today, at the National Association of Broadcasters show, Microsoft announced the Windows Azure Media Services.

From the Windows Azure Blog…

Windows Azure Media Services simplifies the creation, management, and delivery of media to almost any device including Microsoft Xbox, Windows Phone handsets and Windows PCs, as well as non-Microsoft platforms such as smart TVs, set-top boxes, MacOS, iOS, and Android.

Windows Azure Media Services offers a number of services that provide the capability for fast ingestion, encoding, format-conversion, storage, content protection, and streaming of both live and on-demand content. What’s particularly interesting about Windows Azure Media Services is the capability to serve up media across the many different platform sets we see in every day usage. From your Windows Phone to your iPad to your Xbox to your set-top box. The challenge for content providers is hitting the several different formats required for the multitude of devices in the market. With Windows Azure Media Services, the encoding slice of the workflow process allows producers to stream through formats including Smooth Streaming, HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) and Flash Media Streaming.

Imagine a video content producer having the capability to take advantage of the mass storage that Azure provides in addition to being able to manage their production and delivery workflow that covers the majority (it not all) of their primary delivery targets; allowing them to reach more customers with minimal effort and cost.

And for the developer crowd, these services are exposed through HTTP REST API, giving you’re the opportunity to build your own custom solution using the features of Windows Azure Media Services.

You can learn more about Windows Azure Media Services at http://windowsazure.com/media and developers can learn more about the API at the Windows Azure Media Dev Center.

You can also find additional details on the announcement over on Scott Guthrie’s blog.

Unity is a very popular game development tool that takes a lot of the difficulty out of building a game and allows you to focus on the creation of the game itself. One of the reasons Unity is so popular, other than it’s ease of use (compared to the alternatives), but it’s broad support of multiple platforms to run your games on, including all major browsers, Xbox 360, Playstation 3, iOS, and Android.

One blatant omission (in my opinion) on the supported platform list is: Windows Phone.

PressPlay is a studio based in Denmark that has published some very familiar titles such as Max and the Magic Marker and Tentacles. Both of these titles were built using Unity. Both of these titles are in the Windows Phone Marketplace. But how?

The bright minds over at PressPlay saw a need and decided to take action to fill it. They built a toolset to convert Unity games to run on Windows Phone.

What we have done is to recreate a version of the Unity framework within XNA. This allows us to build and design the game within Unity and build it in XNA and eventually play it on our Windows Phone. For a Unity centered studio like ours, it has been great because it has allowed us to maintain our usual workflow within Unity.

Through the generosity of PressPlay and giving back to the community, they have decided to open source this toolset called FFWD (Fast Forward). You can find the project over on GitHub under two repositories: FFWD (the toolset) and FFWD-Templates (template for porting your game). These projects are being maintained by Thomas Gravgaard of PressPlay.

Of course not everything you’re able to do in Unity will be able to be ported over to XNA with FFWD, however Thomas is feverishly adding updates with new support on a regular basis. FFWD may not get you 100% of the way there, but it certainly helps Unity game developers get to Windows Phone quicker.

Now get to it!

Need help getting your mobile app ported to Windows Phone? I can help. Just send me a note through the Contact Form.

Recently, I contributed an article on the Marketplace Test Kit to Jeff Blankenburg’s 31-days of Mango. The Marketplace Test Kit should be used by all Windows Phone developers to perform a check-point on their app, and it’s requirements, prior to submitting it to the Marketplace. If your app doesn’t pass the test kit, it will certainly fail certification in the Marketplace submission process.

One of the Automated Tests within the test kit is to verify you have the correct sized images and file type requirements for your Marketplace artwork.

These are the required artwork items to showcase your app within the various sections of the Marketplace:

One of the attendees from our recent Windows Phone Accelerator labs pinged me the other day for an issue she was having with her images and the Marketplace Test Kit. The Test Kit was reporting an error that stated she had an invalid image size where it was expecting an image size of 62×62.

If you look at the Test Kit, it isn’t asking for an image of 62×62. However… there is a requirement for a 62×62 image, it’s just not listed in the Marketplace Test Kit. The requirement is for the actual application’s icon. This is the icon that is displayed the in application list of the phone once a user downloads your app. There’s also another image that is required at a size of 173×173 (same as the Large Marketplace image) that is your application’s tile for when someone pins your app to their start screen.

So in all, the Marketplace Test Kit is testing image requirements for 5 different tile images. The 3 images required for the Marketplace and the 2 images required for your application on the phone:

You set your small and large app icon’s within your projects Property Page. These are than defined within the WPAppManfest.xml file. It might look confusing, but the Background image property is your application’s Start Screen tile.

Truth be told, the Test Kit validates additional images as it is required that you have at least one screen shot of your app with a size of 800×480 pixels. So don’t forget those images as well. Thankfully, we now have the Screen Capture tool in the Windows Phone Emulator.

You can find all of the requirements for your applications artwork in the Windows Phone Marketplace Documentation.