WACK!! Don’t Publish Your App Without It…
Oh the thrill of knowing you finished you app and are ready to publish it!!! You can’t wait to see the app surface in the Windows Store search results!!! But wait… what if it gets rejected? It will ruin your thrill… Nooooo!!!!!
Enters Windows Application Certification Kit (WACK) -- Love the acronym, cause that’s exactly what it does, it ‘WACK’s you on the head if it finds anything that will make your application fail… just like it is happening with me right now. 
I made small cosmetic changes to the app, but for reasons that I don’t yet know the app now fails – even though it runs perfectly in debugging mode. This wouldn’t be possible without WACK. So NEVER publish your app without WACKing it 
- EVEN if you just corrected some spelling… you never know what else may have change in the dev environment that may cause issues.
HINT 1: This may seem so 80s, but while WACK is WACK-ing **STOP** doing anything with the machine, all the mixed UI activities can interfere with the process and make your app test fail. Just walk away and have a cup of coffee.
HINT 2: I find it preferable to DELETE the target folder content before running the test; otherwise, the tool just lumps all the files in the same directory making it difficult to easily distinguishing them and increasing the chance that you will mix versions of files.
WACK 2.2 is a very powerful tool that puts your app through a simulation where it checks for anything that could make your app fail when submitted to the Store. You can find out more here.
THE TOOLS DEPARTMENT
free/trial tools for developers
- Think blue sky with Azure free trial
- Freedom of Expression with Visual Studio Express 2012
- Tools and SDKs from the Windows Developer Center
- A 30-day Windows App Adventure
- Tools and SDKs from the Phone Developer Center
- A 30-day Phone App Adventure
