On Friday we’ll begin upgrading the infrastructure underlying App Hub and Marketplace, a long-planned improvement project that I first wrote about back in April.
If you have an app you were hoping to update or publish to Marketplace this week, you should submit it today or tomorrow. While maintenance work is underway you may experience delays in app certification and publishing.
This effort also requires App Hub to be taken offline starting next Monday morning Pacific time. I don’t have an exact downtime, but we expect it to be less than 24 hours. Rest assured our teams will be working as quickly as possible to minimize the impact on you. Once the developer portal is back online, you might still encounter an occasional hiccup as we complete the back-end work over the next several weeks.
The good news is that this brief inconvenience will result in a more robust submission and certification pipeline for your Windows Phone 7.5 apps, and address many of the concerns you’ve shared over the months. We appreciate your patience during the upgrade work. If you have questions, please feel free to post a comment and I’ll do my best to answer.