5 tips for a successful WP7 Marketplace submission

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       Note: Consider the theme and accent color changes.(test your application  in dark theme and light theme)

• Give feedback on touch and progress within your UI.
• Pivot and Panorama can make your app looks cool but have in mined the following:

       Note: If a Panorama control is using an image for the background, its Build Action should be set to Resource; otherwise, it will not appear immediately when the application is first displayed. Setting the Build Action to Content would cause it to be loaded asynchronously.

       Note: Use a properly sized image in your application. The recommended dimensions for a Panorama background image is a height of 800 pixels and a width less than 2000 pixels.

      Note:Minimize the number of Pivot control pages when possible for performance considerations.

3.Performance

You can check our previous article : Performance Tips when creating WP7 apps

4.Check the Back button Twice

(Test Case 5.2.4)

A common failure is pressing the back button during application runtime exits the application, instead of returning the application to a previous page or closing the presented menu or dialog!

   - Pressing the Back button from the first screen of an application must exit the application. 
   - Pressing the Back button must return the application to the previous page. 
   - If the current page displays a context menu or a dialog, the pressing of the Back button must close the menu or dialog and cancel the backward navigation to the previous page. 
    - For games, when the Back button is pressed during gameplay, the game can choose to present a pause context menu or dialog or navigate the user to the prior menu screen. Pressing the Back button again while in a paused context menu or dialog closes the menu or dialog.

You can catch the back button  by overriding OnBackKeyPress:

protected override void OnBackKeyPress( System.ComponentModel.CancelEventArgs  e )  
{
    //Be careful!         
    e.Cancel = true;  
}

NOTE: Be careful not to create a loop and  keep in mind that when setting the e.Cancel = true it means stopping the back action on the phone.So you have to do this only when needed.

In our case we handled the event in this way :

protected override void OnBackKeyPress( System.ComponentModel.CancelEventArgs e )  
{      
    if (DemoPopup.isOpen)
    {
     e.Cancel = true;

      //hide the popup
     DemoPopup.IsOpen = false;
    }
    else
    {
     base.OnBackKeyPress(e);
    }        
}  

So that our DemoPopup is opened and the user press the back button then instead of navigating to the previous page the popup will be closed :

5.XAP and Application Manifest Files

The .XAP file is the file that you submit on the App Hub.  It contains the executable file plus all the resources need by the application.  Make sure that you are submitting the Release version of the app. The maximum size of the XAP package file is 225 MB.

Use the Windows Phone Capability Detection Tool for the manifest file.Instead of relying on the application submission process to detect the phone capabilities required for your application, run the Windows Phone Capability Detection Tool to detect and replace the auto-generated capabilities list in your project manifest file with the specific capabilities required by your application. Here is a link to the MSDN documentation.

In this post I gave you some tips for a successful Windows Phone 7 Marketplace submission.

I hope that the article was helpful.

PS: Here are some helpful links connected with the topic:

• Top 10 things to check when you think you are done with your application 
• Application Submission Checklist
• Examples of WP7 Marketplace Certification Failures