Yesterday was my Application Excellence Review with and engineer from Microsoft. The meeting lasted solid 2 hours, not like someone suggested around 15 minutes.

The requirement for the review is to have your app at least 70% ready and it should clearly show the UI and the features of the final app. The developer must complete and submit a long survey about every possible aspect of a metro style app as well as the results of the windows application certification kit (WACK) that comes with the SDK. So besides having your app ready you need to spend at least two hours preparing for the meeting.

The meeting started well, we had a nice chat about win 8 and the marketplace while the engineer was downloading my app from the microsoft support site where I had previously uploaded it. It was really hard for me to upload my 5 files and I guess it was as hard for him to download them. (The site is at least 10 years old and did not work for me most of the time)

After that I demonstrated how the app works, which features are implemented already and which are coming in the release. We also discussed my monetization strategy.

I was up for a good start… and then he run the WACK… and it failed!!! The WACK has never failed for me before and I run it again while I was talking to him and it worked on my machine (WACK WOMM) again… It will be fun times when I finally submit the app for marketplace certification… Now I was nervous. He looked at the report from when I run the WACK in the morning and said that it is not a requirement for the WACK to succeed at this stage but once I submit for certification it should work.

That was the first 20 minutes. For the next hour and a half we went thru every single question of the survey and we discussed every single possible feature that a metro app could implement.

Overall the meeting was very positive and the guy gave me several very good suggestions. Few hours later I received my token and today I registered my (free for 2 years) developer account.