Hands-On Lab: Building your first App for Windows 8.1 and publishing it to the Windows Store.

I recently created this hands-on lab and ran it in  an on-site event here at Microsoft Switzerland. People gave me very good feedback so I decided to publish it in full.

The lab contains everything you need to complete the exercise, including a detailed, 50 page step-by-step manual as Word- or PDF document. Every step is well explained so you don’t need prior Windows App development experience.

In it, you will be creating a YouTube video player app from scratch (File, new Project) for a specific YouTube channel and publish it to the Microsoft store. The final app will look something like the following, but you can tailor it to your YouTube channel of choice.

The lab also makes use of some of the new Windows 8.1 controls like the Hub and the Microsoft Player Framework to play back streaming video.

Windows 8 features like the App bar, asynchronous programming and sharing videos through the Share Charm are all covered.

Also, all the sometimes confusing publishing steps are explained in detail, including how to optimally create properly sized screen-shots using the simulator in Visual Studio 2013…

…how to properly describe the app select the right category and markets…

…and test the app using the “Windows App Certification Kit”, so publishing is as smooth as possible.

Prerequisites

All you need to complete the lab is a computer running Windows 8.1 and a version of Visual Studio 2013, that can create XAML/C# based Windows store apps. The free “Visual Studio Express 2013 for Windows” edition will do just fine.

To publish the lab, you will need an active Windows Store account, details how to sign up can be found here and here. Pricing per year is CHF 17 for individuals and CHF 90 for companies

Give me the Files!

You can download the whole lab from: http://corti.ch/w81-store-hol