Master Key sent for approval

I’ve finally sent Master Key off to the App Hub for approval so I now have to wait and see if it passes and gets published.

Writing my first Windows Phone app has been an interesting process.  Like anything new it’s taken quite a long time to go from a blank sheet of paper through to the final solution and now that I’ve done it once I’m pretty confident that next time it will be much quicker.

Writing for the WP7 platform is great, especially as I’m very experienced with Visual Studio, c# and to a lesser extent Silverlight.  Microsoft have excelled themselves in producing such a great development environment.

I’ve now completed version 1.0 of the application and am already thinking of version 2.0; I would have continued to add features but really wanted to complete the first deployment and get onto the Marketplace.  As I follow a RAD process it can be quite hard to be disciplined and stop development as feedback testing suggests new features and better approaches to solving a problem.

Setting up my account on App Hub has been very time consuming.  As a UK based developer I have to jump through a bunch of US IRS hoops in order to get paid the full royalty amount without losing 30% in withholding taxes.  While this is not much of an issue currently as I’m not expecting any significant royalties it will hopefully be worthwhile in the future.

Along with putting the app up for approval I’ve finally deployed the MDL website.  It does not have a great deal of content currently but I have published the help for Master Key.  The web site is at:

http://www.metadev.co.uk

I used the new WebMatrix tool to create the site and am reasonably happy with the outcome.  I use Discount.ASP as my hosting service; I’ve used them for a few years now and am pretty pleased with their level of support and the functionality.

It took me a few goes to get the deployment to work properly but this was partly down to me using .NET4.0, having to configure IIS7 and modify one of the CSHTML pages so that it wasn’t attempting to connect to a database.

I tried to use FTP but it didn’t work very well and read the recommended method was to use Web Deploy. I used the ‘Import publish settings’ to get the correct info from Discount.ASP and all I had to do was enter my password.  You need to use ‘Validate Connection’ and ensure it passes before deploying.

Take a look at this support article on Discount.ASP site:

http://support.discountasp.net/KB/a891/how-to-deploy-an-application-using-web-deploy-feature.aspx

Configure IIS7 by checking the box to give your Discount.ASP login account access.

I added the following to the web.config – I am not convinced that this is necessary as I do not have a database.

    <connectionStrings>
        <add name="LocalSqlServer" connectionString="x" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />
    </connectionStrings>

I still had errors but this time they were more explicit and commenting out this line: 

//WebSecurity.InitializeDatabaseConnection("StarterSite", "UserProfile", "UserId", "Email", true);

in _AppStart.cshtml fixed it and my web site was deployed.

Advertisement