Microsoft is pulling all the stops to get developers on board with creating apps for the Windows Phone Marketplace. Its latest strategy is Generation App, a bundle of different tools and services with a single promise for the developer: it will guarantee that you complete the app development process from start to finish in 30 days.
The Generation App program is hosted on 30tolaunch.com, which is where you can register for the campaign or learn more. You’ll find that the 30-day schedule ranges from learning about designing strategies, user interface development, Microsoft Silverlight, advertising and monetization of the app and so on and so forth. It’s everything a developer needs to know to design the app and release it into the Windows Phone Marketplace in a single month.
Because it’s a Microsoft campaign, Generation App only supports developing for Microsoft programs, as you could imagine. That means you can build apps for Windows Phone, Windows 8 due out this fall, or Windows Azure, the cloud platform.
Microsoft so far has actually done a pretty good job increasing developer interest in the Windows Phone platform. The company just announced last week 100,000 apps in the Marketplace and the growth rate over the past few months looks very reassuring. 100,000 apps is significantly less than what Google Play offers or the 650,000 Apple just announced in the App Store as of yesterday, but I think once we start getting into the hundreds of thousands, the amount of apps on a platform starts to matter less since there’s already so many and the quality of those apps starts to matter more.