Blog Series: [Your App Here] Campaign – Introduction

Microsoft have recently announced a new advertising campaign that will showcase your Windows Phone 7 application if you win. This summary of what this entails:

• Each month from December through February, up to seven apps will be selected and promoted in campaigns created and funded by Windows Phone.
• The prize: Winning apps will be featured in a digital Windows Phone advertising campaign, with banner ads and up to one million ad impressions across the MSN Network of sites. During the campaign, apps will also get a featured placement on the Windows Phone Marketplace.

On this note I have decided to create a blog series on creating a Windows Phone 7 application from start to finish.  Currently there are three deadlines that you can enter your application to:

10/25 – For December 2011 Campaign Consideration
11/16 – For January 2012 Campaign Consideration
12/22 – For February 2012 Campaign Consideration

The application that I will be creating will be for a passion of mine… restaurants and dining out.

The blog series will include the folllowing:

1. Blog Series: [Your App Here] Campaign – Introduction
2. Blog Series: [Your App Here] Campaign – Getting Started
3. Blog Series: [Your App Here] Campaign – Prototyping and Initial Wireframing
4. Blog Series: [Your App Here] Campaign – Creative Design with Windows Phone 7 “Metro” Guidelines
5. Blog Series: [Your App Here] Campaign – Application Build Developement
6. Blog Series: [Your App Here] Campaign – Marketplace Testing and Submission

Follow my blog for updates on the coming series of blog posts….

Marketplace Test Kit – Application Capabilities

I thought I would share this gotcha to save you some headache and potentially another round of Marketplace testing.

I recently submitted an application to the Windows Phone Marketplace for testing and to my complete surprise it came back reporting a failure.

In fact it was a very serious failure relating to the application terminating with an unhandled exception when viewing a page with the Web Browser control.  I had tested the application thoroughly on multiple devices and the emulator to which I could not replicate the error sent from the Marketplace Test team.

After some investigation using the Marketplace Test Kit I noticed something rather strange where the reported capabilities for the phone were wrong. Even though I was using the Web Browser control within one of my application pages it was reporting that the following capability was not required:

With a little help from @paulfo and the guys at Microsoft they informed me that the Capability Tool only parses the assemblies and not XAML to establish the application capabilities.  So this meant if my Web Browser control was not declared in the generated code behind it would not be picked up by the capabilities tool.

So to simply fix this issue I needed to add the x:Name attribute as follows:

Incorrect:

Correct:

Now the toolkit reports the application requires the ID_CAP_WEBBROWSERCOMPONENT.

Note:
The reason I don’t need to give the web browser control a name within my XAML is because I am using the MVVM pattern where my code is not within the code behind of the XAML.