A new requirement has been established in the technical certification section for the Windows Phone Marketplace: Application Testability (5.1.4). Let's take a minute to look at the requirement in detail:

"The application must be testable when it is submitted to Windows Phone Marketplace. If it is not possible to test your application for any reason […] your application may fail this requirement."

The requirement then lists some items that apply to testability. For example, if using your application requires a user account, you need to provide test credentials the tester can use during the certification phase. Of course, the list provided there is not exclusive. Take my open source project PAARC as another example. It doesn't require a user account, but it is only really functional if you use the phone app in conjunction with a desktop application you want to control remotely. To this end, I provided a sample application and added the download link as well as detailed instructions for testers during submission. You can use the already available field for testing instructions in the certification process for this. In some cases you may even need to file a technical exception, for example if the app is only functional with additional external hardware.

One twist in this story is that you should not forget to remove, deactivate or suspend test accounts or any test infrastructure that you established for certification once the app has been accepted. To continue the sample of the certification documentation: you don't want anybody to find out how to create gift cards for free, or use a sample gift card code without paying for it, right?

In my opinion, providing sufficient information for testing, and making sure that the required infrastructure for your app (web services etc.) is available, up and running during the certification phase already, is only common sense. However, until now your app passed certification if parts of it couldn't be tested due to these issues. This will now be different and turned into the opposite: if testers are not able to access certain features of your app because required data or technical support is missing, it will fail certification.

So make sure that you keep this in mind, especially because at the moment (re-)certification of an app may take up to 7 calendar days due to the high volume of submissions – you don't want to wait twice just because you didn't provide a test account the first time, do you?

Do you want to become a Microsoft Certified Professional Developer on Windows Phone 7? Then you have to take two MCTS exams (for Silverlight 4 Development and Data Access with the .NET Framework 4.0) and a PRO exam named Designing and Developing Windows Phone Applications. As a preparation for this exam, I have created an article series over at Silverlight Show a while ago that covers all the skills that are being measured by this exam.

I'm proud to announce that the team of Silverlight Show has made it possible to offer these articles as e-book, available for download in various formats for all your favorite readers. Not only does this e-book contain my own articles on the exam and surrounding topics, but also the referenced articles in this series that have been written by other authors. I absolutely need to thank all those people for their permission to include their great articles – this project would not have been possible without them!

I have used the resources covered in this e-book to prepare myself for the exam, which I successfully took in July this year. If you are interested in learning more, you have the following options to obtain the book for a very moderate price tag of less than five US-$ here:

The e-book in the Silverlight Show e-book store (PDF, mobi, ePub formats)
The e-book on Amazon.com (Kindle format)
The e-book on Amazon.de (Kindle format)

I hope you enjoy this release and wish you all the best for your exam!

In the last article, I talked about the specific requirements and recommendations regarding Windows Phone 7 iconography, including images for your application's tiles, the Marketplace, and application bar buttons. This time, I want to take it a step further and sum up all of the most important key points of the application certification requirements in the form of a cheat sheet.

The full requirements can be found online on MSDN. The following will provide you short summaries of the technical and submission requirements as well as the application policies. The order is not necessarily the same as in the original documentation, to structure the information a bit more for a developer's view. Please note that this is not a normal article. It is not intended to be read from top to bottom – instead it is meant as a reference for quick look-ups where you don't want to click through/search the complete requirements online. You can download a handy single-page PDF/XPS version at the end of the article which for example can be printed out and pinned to a wall in your working space, so you have everything at hand with a quick look.

The full article and the print version downloads of the cheat sheet can be found on Silverlight Show.

Edit (2011-07-31): Woops, I just realized that I accidentally forget to make this post public. The original upload date was July 15th.

When I was working on my article series about how to prepare for the Windows Phone 7 certification exam 70-599 over at Silverlight Show (you can find the series here), I was eager to take that exam myself. Originally I had planned to take the beta exam, but missed the timeframe when it was available, so I had to wait until the official release date, which was planned for July 14th.

On July 11th I visited the Prometric website to check something different for a client and realized that the Windows Phone exam was available for scheduling already, so I spontaneously picked the first possible date to attempt it myself, which was July 12th. If you follow me on Twitter you may know already that I passed the exam that day, which of course made me very happy :). This morning the corresponding entry showed up on my MCP site.

For me, equally important as passing the exam was to see whether my preparation articles really are useful to people who want to prepare for this certification, and if they cover everything that is required. Well, if you have ever taken one of Microsoft's certification exams and are familiar with the regulations, you know that you are not allowed to talk about any of the exam content or modalities, so I'm obviously not going into any details here; however, it's safe to say that yes, these articles are a good guideline for everybody who wants to take this exam. You can use it to double-check whether you have enough experience in all required areas, and to brush up your knowledge on those parts that you have only barely dealt with or feel insecure about.

So I hope that this contribution to the community will be a continued help and actually encourages devs to get an official validation of their knowledge by taking this exam!

This is the last part of my article series to prepare you for Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 exam which will be available starting July 14th. For a short introduction and overview of the exam as well as a list of general learning materials please take a look at the first article.

The official outline of the measured skills breaks down the topics into the following parts:

• Designing Data Access Strategies (19%) (this article)
• Designing and Implementing Notification Strategies (17%)
• Working with Platform APIs, Tasks, and Choosers (21%)
• Designing the Application Architecture (21%)
• Designing the User Interface and User Experience (23%) (this article)

The last article was about the general application architecture and hence dealt with topics like the application life cycle and tuning for performance and certification requirements. This last part focuses on the user interface and user experience on the phone, from best practices in programming to recommendations and requirements for creating a consistent and convenient experience in your software.

You can find the full article on Silverlight Show.

This is the fourth part of my article series to prepare you for Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 exam which will be available starting July 14th. For a short introduction and overview of the exam as well as a list of general learning materials please take a look at the first article. The official outline of the measured skills breaks down the topics into the following parts:

• Designing Data Access Strategies (19%) (this article)
• Designing and Implementing Notification Strategies (17%)
• Working with Platform APIs, Tasks, and Choosers (21%)
• Designing the Application Architecture (21%) (this article)
• Designing the User Interface and User Experience (23%)

The last article was all about working with specific platform APIs. In this part, we'll take a look on the overall architecture of an application and unique concepts of the Windows Phone platform as well as tuning your application for performance and marketplace certification.

Read the full article on Silverlight Show.

This is the third part of my article series to prepare you for Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 exam which will be available starting July 14th. For a short introduction and overview of the exam as well as a list of general learning materials please take a look at the first article. The official outline of the measured skills breaks down the topics into the following parts:

• Designing Data Access Strategies (19%) (this article)
• Designing and Implementing Notification Strategies (17%)
• Working with Platform APIs, Tasks, and Choosers (21%) (this article)
• Designing the Application Architecture (21%)
• Designing the User Interface and User Experience (23%)

The last article was all about Push Notifications and hence needed to take the architecture of the whole Windows Phone eco system into consideration, including your own Web Services that back your applications, and Microsoft's Push Notification Service. In this part, we'll concentrate entirely on the phone and learn about some of the features the platform offers for your application.

Read the full article on Silverlight Show.

This is the second part of my article series to prepare you for Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 exam that will be available starting July 14th. For a short introduction and overview of the exam as well as a list of general learning materials please take a look at the first article. The official outline of the measured skills breaks down the topics into the following parts:

• Designing Data Access Strategies (19%) (this article)
• Designing and Implementing Notification Strategies (17%) (this article)
• Working with Platform APIs, Tasks, and Choosers (21%)
• Designing the Application Architecture (21%)
• Designing the User Interface and User Experience (23%)

In the last article we've seen what your data access strategies are, both for remote data as well as local storage. We've also briefly mentioned the limitations of network connectivity on the phone and what features of the platform help you deal with these. In this part, we turn on Push Notifications and surrounding topics. You can read the full version over at Silverlight Show.

Microsoft's certification exam 70-599 for its new mobile platform is named "Designing and Developing Windows Phone 7 Applications" and will be published on July 14th, 2011. In this new article series I'm writing for Silverlight Show I will try to bring you up to speed to take the exam once it is available. Of course you can also use the info and resources as a basis to plan your own, self-paced learning to prepare for the exam at a later point. You can read the first part about "Designing Data Access Strategies" here. If you have any feedback or suggestions, feel free to leave any comments there, or contact me.