Mobile2Market updates for Signing and Certification

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For those of you who didn’t catch this at MEDC 2007 in Vegas, there were some significant announcements around Mobile2Market in Dan Bouie’s Session.

 

First off, we announced an updated Designed for Windows Mobile logo program for WM5 and WM6. The logo criteria had not been formally revised since the 2003SE release, so it’s great to see the program and logo criteria get a much needed makeover. Do you have to get logo certified? No. But there are some great reasons to do it in order to make your application stand out in the market. Find out more here.

 

Another important announcement-- major improvements in the signing arrangements with VeriSign. For those of you signing today, you know that every file (EXE, MUI, DLL, etc.) was a unique signing event. It was also a rather “manual” process to sign all the components, push through the signing partner, then sign the CAB, repeat, etc. If you had a very componentized application (lots of dlls) and/or maintained multiple versions, and did a quarterly release, etc…then you know where I’m going with this.

 

Make it easier… Our WM6 includes CabSignTool.exe which was the first step in simplifying a complex process. Point it at your CAB and it cracks the CAB apart, signs everything, packages the CAB back up, and then signs the CAB. Now, if that approach could also be used with, oh I don’t know—VeriSign, wouldn’t that be sweet?

 

We heard a lot of feedback from customers around the current process and have been working to make this better. This has to be somewhat of a “teaser” post as we’re still waiting on some of the work to be finalized (and I don’t want to steal their thunder)…but-- things ARE about to get much, much better. If you sat in on Dan’s session, you know what I’m talking about. Stay tuned and I’ll post more on this as soon as it’s all final. This is really great news for anyone signing with M2M today (really, really). It will simplify your life and save you a lot of money.

 

This also segues into my next blog post… I think I’ll call it “when good signatures go bad”.

 

 -Reed