One of the best initiatives Microsoft has created for us, poor students, is the platform called DreamSpark https://www.dreamspark.com

For the people that are not familiar with it: it offers a lot of ide’s and tools, and even some full featured os’ses so you can start develop within a couple of hours, read: visual studio, windows server, sql server, windows embedded, etc… And all of this is for free if you are a student. NIIIIICE π
Anyway, when you want to develop something for Windows Phone, you get the emulator. But eventually, you want to test your app on a real world device (at least, I want that π ).
The privilege of placing your app in the appstore, and thus being able to test this on a physical device, is reserved for developers who pay $99… And for students, when you register via DreamSpark… NIIICE again! π
Because you are getting a spot in the marketplace for free, you have to be authenticated. This authentication process is done by geotrust, a third party doing Microsoft’s work π
The process exisits out of 3 steps
- creating an application in visual studio and debugging using the emulator
- uploading your app to the app hub
- getting authenticated by geotrust
And you’re ready to go π
Currently, IΒ passed the authentication process from geotrust by scanning my Belgian ID and e-mailing this towards geotrust. (A couple of stupid errors came trough, like for example “mendel alias” is not my real name of-course… π , but the guys are geotrust where wonderful, thx again if you’re reading this!)
So, from now on, I’m an official WindowsPhone developer! Lol ^^
First app in the marketplace (still needs to be approved) is a check tool (like for example the mobilevikings tool) for the download statistics of my ISP: Dommel.

We’ll see how everything turns out in the future π