Trouble For Microsoft Developers With the Windows Store

An anonymous reader writes "This blog post from an un-happy Microsoft developer highlights many of the problems that developers are having with submitting to the new Windows store. His app, that won 2 App X challenges from Microsoft, has been rejected 6 times over 2 months with no clear indications as to the cause. This is even after going through a rigorous early-certification process. With Windows RT relying solely on apps from the store, and there being just over 7,000 apps total, Microsoft could have a big problem here."

Comments

Re:this guy is an idiot

[cbhacking]

No, pretty sure *you* are the idiot here. If you'd actually RTFA, instead of whatever brief skim you took, you'd have seen that the guy ran WACK every time... and that it always ran clean on his system. He eventually got a failure out of it by running his VM's performance down to the Win8 mimum specs, but even after fixing that he continued getting unexplained errors from the certification process that didn't show up on his local system.

Also, WACK failed to catch a very simple and obvious thing - a piece of dev/test code that he'd left in a constructor, which will crash the app when run if installed from the store - that it clearly should have. That's exactly the kind of thing that static analysis should have found.

I'm rather shocked by Microsoft's failures, here. Usually, they're very good with dev tools and communication. Not this time, it seems. You'd think they'd have learned from the problems Apple had... it almost feels like they're trying to repeat Apple's mistakes too.

Goddamn "evangelists"

[Rogerborg]

How apt: belief based development.

Back in the mid 90s, I worked at a games company where we were struggling to get the performance of Direct3D Retained Mode (anyone else remember that?) up to anywhere near Glide levels on Voodoo hardware. It was "escalated" until some DirectX "evangelist" rocked up at our office to "assist."

His "assistance" consisted of looking out of the window and telling us that we must be doing something wrong, because his developers assured him that D3DRM should perform better than anything that we could roll ourselves.

"Look," we said, "here's the same app, showing the same scene, and the framerate of the D3DRM version is half that of Glide."

But he wouldn't look. He literally wouldn't look at the screens. He wouldn't even acknowledge the problem. Just kept going on about how we must be mis-using it, because he had been assured.

Needless to say, we dropped D3DRM, as did everyone else, and it died in a corner, alone and unloved. But it did give us a valuable insight into the developer and "evangelist" culture at Microsoft. I think all Windows developers learn it eventually, which is why Microsoft need a constant influx of bright eyed, bushy tailed young suckers who'll fall for the line that they only hurt us because they love us so much.