Programming Windows Store Apps with C#

Chapter 15. Sideloading and Distribution

The most basic form of distribution is a test distribution. You would most likely use this if you wanted to give a partner, customer, or other members of the team a version of your app to test.

You’ll recall that when you start developing Windows Store apps in Visual Studio, the first thing that happens is you are asked to obtain a developer license. This is a form of sideloading. With a developer license installed, you can deploy any apps from any source onto that device.

There are two things to bear in mind with this. First, sideloading totally opens up the device to Windows Store malware by removing the deployment restrictions. Second, you are only permitted to use this approach for testing. You cannot use it for production deployment, and Microsoft is very strict about this. (One read of this is that Microsoft gets paid for the special licenses that you need to support production sideloading, but does not get paid for the developer licenses used for development sideloading.)

For my test, I created a separate virtual machine and installed Windows 8 Pro 32-bit. (I usually use 64-bit, and use 32-bit for variety more than anything.) What I wanted to do was have an entirely separate installation. I created the machine without a Microsoft Account association—that is, I used a local account to log on.

So let’s do this for your application. The first thing you have to do is set the product build mode to Release. There are two reasons for this. First, ...