Deploying Applications on Windows Phone 7

It seems the only way to deploy applications on Windows Phone 7 is via the market place. You can register up to 3 phones for $99 to allow you to side load but that's no good to me. I develop commercial apps which I don't want to seel through the market place - I need to choose my clients and offer a full service includi开发者_StackOverflowng configuration, training etc. How does this work for people like me ? Thanks, Gary

At the moment, it doesn't. There are no alternatives at present - but I strongly suspect that Microsoft is working on it.

Unlike previous versions of Windows Mobile, Windows Phone 7 has been heavily targeted at consumers rather than business users. I'm sure in the future it will get more business-friendly options (e.g. an "internal" marketplace so that businesses can have their own internal apps available only to them) but it's not there yet. Don't forget it's effectively the v1 of the platform.

It's coming. The first notion of this will be the Beta release programme where you can nominate specific Live IDs for your app to be exclusively available to on the marketplace. This was discussed leading up to RTM, but has slipped. It was confirmed as still on the roadmap at RTM release.

This infrastructure, we're told, will pave the way to enterprise deployment and on a smaller scale (for beta testing) will serve to load test the infrastructure behind it.

If you'd like some more background on this, feel free to check out Loke Uei Tan's WPH312 Tech Ed 2010 NA talk at around 10 minutes in.