14 DAY TRIAL // More good news for developers emerged from Redmond-based Microsoft in regard to the building and distributing applications for the Windows Phone 7 operating system. Following the recent announcement regarding the updated Windows Phone Marketplace policies, the company unveiled that developers would have the opportunity not only to make their software solutions available for all users of a Windows Phone 7 device, but also for only a small, selected portion of them.
To be more precise, the move regards the beta testing of applications submitted to the Marketplace. As soon as a developer has a beta version of the software solution available, and wants to get feedback on it, he/she can choose to have it available only for a selected number of users. According to Microsoft, this is a new step it takes in promoting cloud services, since the Marketplace is nothing else than this. The company's long term strategy involves the adoption of both the public and private cloud models with Marketplace.
“The public model enables developers to market and distribute applications to all phone users globally or based on a particular geography. In contrast the private model enables developers to use the same Marketplace service to distribute applications to a defined set of people that they select for beta-testing. Developers will identify their beta-testers and then upload their application to the developer portal. The Windows Phone application deployment system will then ensure that the application is available on the beta-tester’s phones via a “deep link” the tester will receive in email. We’ll be rolling this mechanism out as we finalize the developer portal this fall,” a post on the Windows Phone Developer Blog reads.
According to the post, the private distribution of apps will be initially enabled in a manner that should be optimized for beta-testers, though all registered developers would be able to benefit from it. App builders will have the opportunity to distribute test solutions in a secure way, the company added. Moreover, it seems that a similar model is set to be put in place for corporate customers too, as an extension of the private cloud model announced now for developers.
“So we’re starting by implementing a feature to help developers test applications, but over time we’re going to build on this public and private cloud philosophy to make the Marketplace infrastructure accessible to corporate and business customers as well. This will create an even richer marketplace for the games and applications that already live there by attracting an even broader base of customers who will no doubt want more than line of business applications on their new Windows Phone 7,” the aforementioned post concludes.