So you want to create an app? Or perhaps a game? We want to help! And we don’t want to simply help you to create any old app or game, but want to give you tips, tricks, techniques and tutorials on how to make the best app or game you can.

Fortunately, creating and publishing an app for the Windows platform has become increasingly accessible and straightforward with ever-improving tools that are stable, incredibly functional and provide aid for the developer in a myriad of ways. Microsoft has a variety of languages and technologies a developer can choose from; a wealth of choice that enables developers to create high quality client, mobile, gaming and cloud applications. In addition, Microsoft has a great selection of platforms to develop for, from Windows 8 to Windows Phone to cloud-based solutions with Windows Azure, and even the Xbox 360.

Sound exciting? It should! Making an app has never been easier and the sheer variety of technologies, platforms and tools you have at your disposal gives you the ability to choose the one that suits your needs and your chosen direction.

To make a great, entertaining, feature-rich application, it’s not necessarily as simple as having easy to create apps, and so this document provides guidelines on how to make your app shine. They help a developer have the best chance at success in getting an app published to the appropriate store. As a result, developers could end up with a highly regarded entry that receives great reviews, is used by many and could be held up as a fantastic example of what makes an app shine on the Microsoft platform over the competition.

We’re conscious that developers run the gamut of experience levels, some with great skill, some approaching app development for the first time. The intention of this guide is to help you recognize the crucial components of a quality app regardless of your experience. For those just starting out, at times it’s hard to know if your idea is unique right at the beginning or, at the other end of the process, are unsure how to publish your app effectively.

To help the developer adopt the concept of “quality app” creation instead of simply building a templated app or creating an app in isolation of fundamental processes, we’ve highlighted some of the top key areas for what makes up a quality app. In this guide, you’ll find six pillars of quality – foundational concepts that, if built upon properly, will increase the chance of a successful outcome for you.

And guess what? Having a great quality app not only provides benefit to your end users but great benefit to you as well. It could be seen as an online resume or a way for people to see your progress historically if you’re looking for a career in technology, and just as importantly, the Windows Store and Windows Phone Store provide great revenue opportunities too!

Finally – good news! We have an expanded version of this guide that goes into detail on each of the six pillars, some Do’s and Don’ts and a bunch of resources you can click through to so as to gear up for your journey to build a great app.

Check out the six pillars we recommend you base your app development on.

Pillar 1: Unique Concept or Idea

Making sure you can come up with a great idea that is interesting and is not “just another” app amongst a bunch of identical apps is critical. Research your idea thoroughly so that you don’t duplicate something else already available, and figure out ways to bring it to life creatively.

Pillar 2: User Experience and App Design

Without great design principles in place, it’s easy to have an app have a confusing or illogical experience and/or design and overall provide a poor user experience. This starts with the first place the user interacts with the app – in the store. However, this pillar of app design is more than just UI: plan your design from the ground up to be solid including database, infrastructure and what type of application architecture you’ll use.

Pillar 3: Feature Richness

An important concept in differentiating apps built on the Windows platform is implementing the many unique and creative features on Windows 8 or Windows Phone, while keeping a focus on the one specific thing the app is made to do. There are dozens of features of Windows 8 and Windows Phone that you can use to make your app stand out, so make sure you explore them for your app.

Pillar 4: Quality Coding

Without great code underneath the app, the chances of hitting certification errors in security, technical and content compliance increases through bugs, crashes and freezes. Use your design work from Pillar 2 and combine it with great coding practices to ensure you have solidly performing application code.

Pillar 5: Designed for Multiple Devices and Contexts

With the wealth of platforms to choose from, building an app that runs across multiple devices, such as a Windows 8 laptop and a Windows Phone 8 mobile device, is a way to differentiate and bring extra value. So if you have a great mobile app, consider how it might work on Windows 8 too. Also, making sure you take advantage of the multiple contextual views that the platform offers, such as snapped and filled views on Windows 8, is also key.

Pillar 6: Cloud Integration

The cloud is now an integral part to many quality apps, from roaming settings across devices, to using notification services and live tile updates, to storing historical data or even high score lists for games for comparison between players. Great apps will utilize the cloud in appropriate aspects of the app itself, and using Windows Azure as part of the development process makes this a very straightforward proposition.

So there you have it – six great pillars to rest the approach to your app on. If you want to check out the more detailed guide that walks through each of these in detail, including resources and Do’s and Don’ts, check it out here: 6 Pillars of Quality App Development and Design (DreamSpark)

• Team UMA, Angola – Don’t Fret
• Zeppelin Studio, Austria – Schein
• WickedGames, Czech Republic – reSOUND
• Banzai Lightning, France – SEED
• Seven Worlds, France – Kameon
• Solite Studio, Indonesia – Save the Hamsters
• PsyTrack, Puerto Rico – Piggy Spanker
• Quad Damage, Russia – Lasercraft
• Space Fighters, Turkey – Space Fight X
• Bluetooth, Vietnam – Green Heaven

For more information on the teams, you can check out the official page here: https://aka.ms/apic13e.

Congratulations all, I look forward to seeing you in Russia!

A quick note on team selections: Every country participating in Imagine Cup was able to select a national representative to go to St Petersburg to compete in one of the three main competitions: World Citizenship, Innovation and Games. We then supplemented those country finalists who represent the Games Competition with a number of teams from the online Games Competition which I look after. The above list represents the top games in the online competition AND those teams that are representing their nation.

All Online Entries: If you’d like to see all of the game trailers for the hundreds of games we judged in the online competition, check out my playlists here: https://aka.ms/apic13c and https://aka.ms/apic13d. Don’t forget to comment on and thumbs up those entries you think are cool and you’d love to play. :)

Date and time: March 26, 2013, 9am-10am US Pacific Time

Make sure you check your local time! Here are some other timezones to get you started:

• United Kingdom – 4pm-5pm
• East Coast, Australia – March 27, 3am-4am (sorry guys!)
• Korea – March 27, 1am-2am
• St Petersburg, Russia – 8pm-9pm

https://join.microsoft.com/meet/jacqchen/6UIJ9Z3Z

It’s being hosted on Lync, so make sure you have the right software installed beforehand (you can grab it here).

Why not run your own WOWZAPP 2012 mini-party? We’ll even help you get set up with registration and we’d love to put your event on the map. Of course, WOWZAPP 2012 is all about exploring, learning and creating apps for Windows so that’s a requirement but hey, isn’t that why you’re reading this blog!?

If you’re interested, check out the info deck I’ve put up either on SlideShare or Skydrive.

Regardless though, I sincerely hope that you’ll get along to a WOWZAPP location and spend time with fellow developers and designers, creating Windows 8, Windows Phone and even Windows Azure applications! I can’t wait to see what everyone comes up with!

WOWZAPP 2012 will run in dozens of countries around the globe – all on the one weekend – November 9-11 – allowing developers and designers the world over to come together with one goal – to have fun, network and learn and to build apps and games for Windows.

The publicly confirmed locations so far are (more coming soon!):

• Algeria – Algiers
• Austria – Vienna
• Belgium – Brussels
• Brazil – Sorocaba
• Bulgaria – Sofia
• Czech Republic – Prague
• Finland – Helsinki
• Germany – Berlin
• Greece – Athens
• Kazakhstan – Almaty
• India – Agra-Mathure
• India – Bhopal
• India - Chennai
• India – Cuttak
• India – Pollachi
• India – Pune
• India – Raipur
• India – Rajmandri
• India – Salem
• India – Vadodara
• India – Vellore
• Ireland – Galway
• Lebanon – Beirut
• Lithuania – Vilnius
• Macedonia – Skopje
• Pakistan – Islamabad
• Pakistan – Karachi
• Pakistan – Lahore
• Romania – Bucharest
• Slovenia – Ljubljana
• South Africa – Johannesburg
• Spain – Albacete
• Spain – Madrid
• Spain – Seville
• Spain – Valencia
• Sweden – Stockholm
• Thailand – Bangkok
• Turkey – Istanbul
• Vietnam – Hanoi
• Vietnam – Ho Chi Minh

Updated October 10 2012 with additional locations – in bold.

Head to http://www.wowzapp2012.com for more information and to find the venue closest to you. We have more locations being published all the time, so if you’re not able to find something you could attend, make sure you check back regularly (if you’re really keen, you could send me a note through this blog and tell me where you would like to see a WOWZAPP 2012 location and I’ll connect to the local Microsoft people there to see if we can make that happen).

And the even better news for students is that you get that Store Membership for free through our DreamSpark program! The process is simple:

• Head to DreamSpark.
• Create an account if you haven’t already, or log in to your existing account.
• Verify your student status if you haven’t done so already.
• Navigate to the Windows 8 Development page (linked here if you want a shortcut).
• Click on the Get Registration Code link (you’ll have another chance here to verify your student status if you haven’t done so already).
• Click on the Get Code Now link.
• Copy the code down somewhere nice and safe and then head to the Windows Store Developer Portal and register, entering the code at the appropriate spot and voila! You’re registered and ready to start submitting apps into the store!

If you want more details about this announcement or more details about the Windows Store, you can always check out the Windows Store Blog.

So - the dev tools are free through Dreamspark.com for students, the SDK is ready, and we have a ton of great supporting content to help you build your app and submit it for Store certification. Sign up now, reserve your app names, and we’d love to publish your app in the Store in time for general availability of Windows 8!

With the general availability of Windows 8 rapidly approaching (October 26, if you missed the news) I thought it might of benefit to publish a number of handy links for people to use if they’re getting into developing their own apps.

First up, if you’re looking for support, check out this page first: https://aka.ms/StoreSupport. It summarizes some fundamental design and development considerations, then talks about the various ways you might get help.

Second, if you’re keen on publishing your app or game to the Store (and why wouldn’t you be with the massive opportunity that comes with doing so!?), the Store Certification Requirements page is a MUST read: https://aka.ms/StoreReq.

If you’ve actually moved past this step and submitted your app already, but had some bad news that it didn’t pass certification, this page is your friend: https://aka.ms/StoreFix. This document explains what the common errors are and how you might go about rectifying them in your app.

Want to take your development skills to the next level and show people, whether they be prospective employers, your current company or just your peers, that you’re on top of your game when it comes to Windows 8 development? Check out https://aka.ms/Win8Cert for information on the shiny new MCSD for Windows Store Apps certification.

But back to development for my last two links…

First up, if you intend your app to run on ARM devices (aka Windows RT devices), you should definitely check out the whitepaper that’s all about that very topic: https://aka.ms/ARMdev. You’ll find lots of juicy info on how to approach development and testing of apps that will work well on that platform. Personally, if you don’t intend that your app will run on ARM, I think you’re missing out on a very large potential customer group.

Finally, regardless of what hardware you intend your app to run on, keep in mind that not everyone will have a beast machine like yours, so you should always be efficient in your coding to provide the best performance results. https://aka.ms/PerfBest outlines the best practices to improve performance and how to measure your apps performance – another must read for developers of Windows 8 apps.

The three courses are of different lengths and are designed for different class audience specific fields of study, so hopefully you’ll find something that works for your course.

Designing for Modern UI – A full 11 modules that provide lectures and tutorials with videos on how to design for the Windows 8 UI creating the top user experience.

App Development for Modern UI - this course contains 9 modules that cover the fundamental concepts of developing new style apps using JavaScript and HTML5/CSS3 with Microsoft's tools and resources.

App Development for Modern Devices - this course is for advanced users and runs for across three modules; it covers development systems for phones, tablets and desktop computers, focusing on 

a) fundamentals of building network aware software,
b) interfaces for touch and NUI devices such as Kinect;
c) graphics programming such as writing code that displays augmented reality experiences.

Of course, if you’re a student, you can download these courses and use them as self-study too!

Xbox/Windows

First Place - TANG Thai - Thailand - Verdant Fantasy

Second Place - The Doers - Brazil - Do More

Third Place - Hotfix - Belgium - Influence

Phone

First Place - Drexel Dragons - United States - MathDash

Second Place - Ecosia - France - Ecosia

Third Place - Turtle Games - Hungary - Rum Run