Corporate apps for Windows Phone 7?

Apple has a corporate developer program with an elevated licensi开发者_如何转开发ng cost, does Microsoft provide such a service for Windows Phone 7 developers?

This was asked at a recent MS event. You can assign (I think 5) phones to developer unlock them, then load application directly/bypass the marketplace.

Also, there were talks that they are hoping to soon allow beta/redemption codes to allow limited deployment of your application to non-unlocked phones, bypassing testing/marketplace acceptance.... But I do not know the status of this.

The best thing you can do at the moment is develop your application as normal and have a password/login screen at startup. This is a horrible approach, but it does work.

At the moment, the phone is very much targeted towards consumers.

I'm not sure what is provided in the Apple Enterprise version, but so far Microsoft only has the one registration process and no private app distribution: you can distribute apps on the market to everyone, or by giving your xap file to people with dev-unlocked phones, nothing in between.

The official line is NO, not yet.

Windows Phone 7 was created, first and foremost, for consumers, not enterprise customers.
That being said, LOTS of people are asking for this and Microsoft have said they will address this in the future. No timescales or details have yet been announced yet.

This will likely be related to the way that beta testing and home brew distribution are implemented. (Just my assumption.)

I don't know why I can't just comment on another answer in this thread, so my apologies for placing these remarks in an answer.

I think MS needs to really make this happen since it could be the saving grace for WP7. While I personally feel that my experience with WP7 and my Samsung Focus have been just as good or better than that with the second-gen iPod Touch that I have, there are a lot of people who aren't convinced. For better or worse, it really is the ecosystem that matters and MS has that within the corporate world.