Crash reports help you certify your Windows Store app

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As the Windows Store continues to grow and offer app builders a significant market opportunity, we want to clarify the app certification process, so you know what to do to get your app into the Windows Store. We also want you to know how to proceed if your app fails certification.

Most commonly, an app fails certification because it crashed or didn’t respond during the certification process. Due to any number of reasons an app might crash, it can be hard to know what happened and how to fix it, especially if you don’t experience the crash locally.

Starting on Monday, 1/28, when an app fails certification for either of these reasons, we’ll send a crash file with the certification report. You’ll be able to see exactly what happened during the crash, which should help you identify and fix the issue.

These crash files come in one of two formats:

  • A crash dump (.dmp) file contains critical info about the crashed application. These can be opened in Visual Studio 2012 or with our Windows Debugger Tools.
  • An ErrorInfo (.txt) file contains info about crashes related to an unhandled JavaScript exception.

Both files provide info that can help determine what happened when the app crashed or became unresponsive. Once you’ve fixed the problem, you can resubmit your app.

We’ve updated our Dev Center to include info about analyzing these crash reports. Check it out to learn more about what these files contain, along with specific steps to open and review their contents. And don’t forget, you can also access crash data for published apps through the Quality reports available in your Windows Store Dashboard.

--Dave Smith, Principal Test Manager