Three Windows Phone Apps in a day

A couple of months ago I followed a course on windows phone 7 development.  After attending the course, we were told that we could get a free phone if we developed 3 WP7 apps by the end of February. Me being myself, I of course waited until the middle of February to start developing these apps. 

Then I started to come up with 3 apps that I could build in a day (to be honest it took me 5 hours).  So I came up with the following.

A Fart application: I think everyone knows what this app does.  You shake your phone and farting noises will come out of your speakers.

A grenade app: This one took me the longest because I had to photoshop a grenade so I could flip the pin and move the handle.  It basically turns your phone into a grenade.

A card deck app:  Just a simple application that shows you a deck of card where you can pick one card at a time.

I was a bit scared of the certification process at first but it wasn’t that much of a hassle as I thought it would be.  The submission itself took a small 15 minutes because you need to upload some Icons for your application and a proper screenshot.  The screenshot must be taken in the emulator and of a certain size and format, this is what rejected my fart application the first time.  A colleague of mine also told me that his app got rejected because the NeutralResourceLanguage attribute in de AssemblyInfo.cs wasn’t set properly.  I deployed my app worldwide so I had to set it to:

[assembly: NeutralResourcesLanguage("en", UltimateResourceFallbackLocation.Satellite)] 

It basically tells the marketplace which language your app supports.  The attribute is taken into account in the certification process since the mango release.

Something that struck me when trying to certify my apps is how buggy the apphub site is.   The loading time to view an application is very long and when trying to edit my application details I had to switch to chrome because in Firefox and IE the page just wouldn’t load!

To sum it up, I was pleasantly surprised when I found out my apps got certified.  Hopefully they show up in the marketplace soon so I can collect my new windows phone.  I’ll post an update when the app is available for download.

I’ve been busy moving into a new home the last couple of weeks so that’s why you’ve might have noticed it’s been a bit quiet here.  Don’t fear, I have a couple of interesting blog posts coming up so stay tuned! ;-)