In this How to tutorial we are going to see how to create a screen shot to upload to Windows Phone Marketplace while publishing the application. Microsoft has some certification checklist which need to be passed before we upload the application to the market place. One of the certification passing procedure is the Screen Shot that we need to upload to the market place. The screen shot should pass some basic certification procedure as listed below.

• The Screen shot should be of 480X800 Pixels and should not contain the Windows Phone Chrome (The Emulator Skin).
• The Screen Shot should explain the application directly to the end user, no additional editing need to be done.     [more]
• The Screen Shot should be in .PNG format and should not be in transparent mode.
• Basically we need to upload atleast 1 screen shot which is mandatory and can upload to a maximum of 8 screen shots.
• Users need to make sure that Emulator is set to 100% zoom while taking the screen shot.

Now let us see how to take the screen shot from the Windows Phone Emulator. Open Visual Studio 2010 IDE and open the application in administrator mode and built the application to check if its working fine by executing the project. Now we can see the application is loaded to the Windows Phone Emulator (Nokia Lumia 800 skin) as shown in the screen below.

Now click on the >> to extend the emulator options and we can see the option to take the screen shot as per the Microsoft Standards. Before that check if the emulator zoom is set to 100%. Extending the properties of the emulator we can see the screen shot option as shown in the screen below.

Now we can take n number of screen shots and save to the local drive as supported format (in .png) which can be later uploaded to the Windows Phone Market place. Note that the application screen shot should contain only the application details and the Windows phone Emulator Chrome should not be included to the screen shot. If its included then the application will fail in the market place for publishing.