Notes from a dark corner

Windows Store app solutions and tips for certification

Doug Stewart -MSFT — Thu, 09 May 2013 09:39:36 GMT

Our team within Microsoft Global Business Support that supports developer writing Windows Store apps and Windows Phone apps have a team blog here. This is multi-contributor blog that offers advice and ideas on solving some of the common scenarios that our support teams see customers trying to work through.

One of the areas that is new for many developers of apps for Windows 8 that are made available via the Windows Store is the certification and publishing process. Here are some resources that may be useful for that:

Windows Store app fundamentals

Index of UX guidelines: The index of UX guidelines is the checklist used to evaluate apps in the App Fast Track.

Certification Requirements The formal list if requirements your app has to meet. This is a “living document” that gets updated and has release history notes at the bottom. Note that a recent addition (6.12) is that if you say your app meets accessibility requirements then it has to actually meet the baseline set of requirements. To learn more about Microsoft and accessibility check here. We also have accessibility centre for developers here.

Avoiding common certification failures Driven by the app certification team, this new topic lists common reasons why apps fail certification.

Resolving certification failures This article contains an entry for each certification requirement, and lists the current recommendations for resolving common failures.

HTH

Doug

CLRMD: .NET Crash Dump and Live Process Inspection

Doug Stewart -MSFT — Sat, 04 May 2013 21:46:26 GMT

Lee Culver, a software developer on the .NET Runtime team, has shipped an awesome managed code library for anyone interested in analysing memory dumps and the internals of running .NET applications. Known as CLRMD, this library allows you to write code that does all the kinds of stuff you do with the SOS, PSSCOR2, PSSCOR4 or SOSEX debugger extensions and more.

You can read more about it here

You can get the NuGet package here..

This is a fantastic addition to the debugging toolbox and opens world of possibilities for .NET problem investigation and resolution.

Thanks Lee!

Doug

Windows Azure Developer Challenge

Doug Stewart -MSFT — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 10:16:24 GMT

An exciting competition organised by CodeProject and sponsored by Microsoft is under way with the deadline for completing stage one extended to the 3rd of May. Try Windows Azure and 5 programming challenges for a chance at Spot prizes, Stage prizes and the Grand Prize totalling over $16,000 with 65 chances to win.

Happy cloud coding!

Doug

Hotfix rollup for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1

Doug Stewart -MSFT — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 11:27:43 GMT

An important hotfix package has been released:

An enterprise hotfix rollup is available for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1

“This article describes a hotfix rollup for Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1)-based and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1-based computers. This hotfix rollup contains 90 hotfixes that were released after the release of SP1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. These hotfixes improve the overall performance and system reliability of Windows 7 SP1-based and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1-based computers. We recommend that you apply this hotfix rollup as part of your regular maintenance routine and build processes for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 computers.
This hotfix rollup includes the following improvements:

Improves the Windows Client Remote File System components. These components include the following:

Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV)

DFSN client

Folder Redirection

Offline Files and Folders (CSC)

SMB client

Redirected Drive Buffering Subsystem (RDB)

Multiple UNC Provider (MUP)

Improves the SMB Service and TCP protocol components. These improvements work together with other improvements to help improve the overall networking performance on Windows 7 SP1-based and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1-based computers.”

HTH

Doug

My colleagues in Ireland raising money for the Microsoft CSS Malawi Citizenship project

Doug Stewart -MSFT — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 21:24:12 GMT

My colleagues in Ireland have been stretching their legs raising money for Concern Universal as part of the Microsoft CSS Malawi Citizenship project which I blogged about earlier this year.

They’d still like to raise a bit more money so if you fancy donating a little to help provide clean water in Malawi you can donate

here.

Thank you!

Doug

What to do if you have problems with a Windows Store app

Doug Stewart -MSFT — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 11:07:21 GMT

If you or one of the users of a Windows Store app you’ve developed are having problems with the app, a good starting point may be the Apps troubleshooter that is available.

If you go to this page:

What to do if you have problems with an app

you’ll find some useful advice on what to try.

Also, down at the bottom of that page you see this with the link to launch the Apps troubleshooter:

Once launched it will guide you through:

After selecting next it checks some things and warns you that you may be required to restart:

Finally you will get to the summary screen:

HTH

Doug

Update: Visual Studio Extensions for the Windows Library for JavaScript

Doug Stewart -MSFT — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 00:24:25 GMT

A few days ago the latest update to the Visual Studio Extensions for the Windows Library for JavaScript.

You can find them here.

HTH

Doug

Building Windows Store apps in the UK?

Doug Stewart -MSFT — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 12:21:11 GMT

Our UK Developer and Platform Evangelism team have a great site designed to help get UK developers started building Windows Store apps and make them successful.

You can find it here: http://www.windows-store.co.uk/

HTH

Regards

Doug

Windows Store app crash reports now provided with certification feedback

Doug Stewart -MSFT — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 11:57:25 GMT

Great to see that we are now going to provide crash reports to help you certify your Windows Store app. In other words if the certification report comes back indicating that it crashed in some way during testing, we’ll now provide more detail about the nature of the crash.

The post also points to documentation about how to analyse these crash report.

Mike Taulty has previously written a great blog post about debugging crashes using the dmp files that you can get via the Store Developer dashboard if your app is already in market and your users have been kind enough to allow diagnostic information about your app to be uploaded.

HTH

Doug

What is a Microsoft account?

Doug Stewart -MSFT — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 13:31:37 GMT

Useful short, new video here explaining what a Microsoft account is.

HTH

Doug