In this tutorial we are going to see how to use the Windows Phone Store Test Kits (earlier known as Marketplace Test Kit in 7.1 versions) which provides a complete set of test results before we prepare the package to deploy to the marketplace. This tool will be a show stopper for the application to get rejected while processing through the certification process. Microsoft certification process is bit tougher to handle the requirements that are documented as part of the application submission process. This tool kit will help us to identify some of the basic issues and provide the recommendation to fix the issue before submitting the application to the store which saves a lot of time and energy. [more]
Let us see the steps on how to use the Windows Phone Store test kit which is integrated with Visual Studio 2012 IDE. Open Visual Studio 2012 IDE in administrator mode and and open an existing application which we developed in our previous articles as shown in the screen below.
First build and execute the project to test is locally using the emulator or on the device that the functionality of your application works perfectly. Then right click on the Project name in solution explorer and select the option “Open Store Test Kit” as shown in the screen below.
We can see a new window with the name Store Test Kit opens and at the bottom we can see a prompt message asking for update. If you can see this message click on update as shown in the screen below.
Windows Phone Store test Kit has 3 options which can be used effectively to test the application before we upload to the market place. First is the Application details section where we need to input the Icons and screen shots that are required for the application to deploy in the market place and in the device as per the standards. The exact size of the tile and the screen shots are shown in the same screen itself, so we need to create and use the screen shots as per the standards mentioned. Failing to do the exact configured sized will result in the application package failure here in the test as well as in the Certification process. Here we have added some default icons and screen shots for testing as shown in the screen below.
Now navigate to the next section which is “Automated Tests” which provides tests that validates the basic criteria of the application such as app sizes, image sizes, screen sizes etc as shown in the screen below.
Click on the Run tests will start testing the application with the inbuilt options and rules that are predefined. Also we can see at the bottom an option to start the Windows Phone Application Analysis to understand the performance (check this link to get idea on how to use) as shown in the screen below.
Next section is the Manual tests where we can test the process manually with the set of predefined rules that are available with the steps and the descriptions as shown in the screen below.
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Many thanks for sharing this first-class article. Very inspiring! (as always, btw)