At Prague Mango Event in June this year, Ondrej Strba from Microsoft said that Czech developers will get official access to the Windows Phone Marketplace in the second half of July.
Picture from the Mango Event in Prague in June 2011. Notice the new square Windows Phone logo.
At MIX 2011, the attendees were told there will be a new version of the AppHub this summer.
@gcaughey Todd announced a new AppHub version for summer during his MIX talk. Seems the right time.
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René Schulte (@rschu) July 16, 2011
And this notice was posted on the Microsoft App Hub (the gate to the Windows Phone and XBox Marketplace for developers) on the last Friday:
App Hub down July 18 for service upgrades
Submitted7/15/2011Pardon our dust. App Hub will be down for service upgrades for most of the day starting around 10 a.m. PST on Monday, July 18. During this period, developers will be unable to register, to access their Windows Phone developer accounts, or to use the forums.
We appreciate your patience.
So I bet the safe conclusion is that the Marketplace Access for developers from Czech Republic and other new countries is finally coming!
As I reported before, this should be the list of the new countries now eligible for the application submitting:
- Chile
- China
- Colombia
- Czech Republic
- Hungary
- India
- South Africa
- South Korea
Sure it’s not a long list and I especially regret Slovakia is missing. However, it is still a pretty good reason for celebration for us!
And let’s hope other AppHub improvements are coming too. For example – the Marketplace can be opened for buyers from new countries. I rather doubt it, because it seems Microsoft waits for new languages to be implemented in Mango before it. Or the submission of the Mango-compatible app could be newly supported. Again, I don’t see this coming, because the Mango developer tools are still in beta and I expect Microsoft to require the final version to be used for the published apps. But on the other hand, just one big Marketplace update this summer would make sense too. Any improvement would be welcomed.
Update under progress
New features? XNA? Maybe my bet wasn’t so safe…
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