What is an app excellence lab?The lab is an up to 4-hour engagement with a trained Microsoft Services Engineer. This engineer will run your app through a series of tests based on a quality checklist to ensure your app is (or will be) in top-notch shape when you submit. You will also get a chance discuss ways to make your app even better and you will get answers to any questions you might have.
So this is how it went, I was confidence that my app is about 80 –90 % done. Surprisingly this is not what I expected, it’s seems that my app as functionality is 80 % done but it’s about 50 % from a windows 8 design aspect.
Here are the tips they gave me when I attended the lab.
- Page should take less than 5 seconds to load
- Solution Load page and then show a progress bar
- Solution Load only for example top/random 5 of each group.
- App should behaves well while off-line and on intermittent network connectivity
- Solution Use caching to save the data.
- App must have at least an about page in the settings charm.
- App must support Keyboard , Mouse ,Touch
- Keyboard Handling browsing content through a keyboard using Key up,Key down… events.
- Mouse Handle selecting tiles when using right click. *If your app supports selecting tiles*
- Touch Handle selecting tiles “right click using a mouse” as it might crash. *If your app supports selecting tiles*
- Navigations should not be placed in the appbar.
- Commands such as add,edit,delete,save … should be placed in the appbar.
- Do not use toast notification or modal dialogs for error handling.
- Solution Error handling is inline
- App should adapt to different form factors and aspect ratios
- App should handle snapped, filled, and full view states
- App should properly handle activation from contracts, secondary tiles, and notifications .*If you are using any*