I am developing an app, which I have tested on the visual studio Emulator. I would Like to deploy it to about 8 Phones within our organization. Is there a way to deploy apps directly to the phones without going through the marketplace, or without having to pay the $99 per year app hub memebership fee. I don't need to deploy apps to the marketplace place at this time, just directly to our personal company phones. I have tried running the "windows phone developer registration", but I get a message stating that I have to register my phone in the Marketplace, and that is where I am asked to pay a $99 membership fee.
4 Answers
Nope, unfortunately you can't deploy to any phone you want. The phone needs to be developer unlocked, meaning you need to have paid the $99 AppHub membership fee and registered the phone. I believe you can register a maximum of 3 phones under one account.
The other option is to, of course, jailbreak the phone. Google to see if you can lay your hands on a copy of Chevron WP7. The other owners may not be very willing to go along with this though. On the other hand, they'd probably love it if you bought all of them AppHub licenses :-)
You can unregister phones on AppHub, so maybe you can buy one license, unlock 3 phones, test on those, then unlock another 3 after unregistering the first 3 ...
If you have one developer account, you can use the beta feature on the AppHub to allow the other users in your organisation to download the app from the marketplace.
You just have to add their LiveId to the app. There's a limit on users, but if it was 10 or 50, I can't remember. You should go check it out.
If you don't have a developer account, you're pretty much square.
Stay tuned for Chevron Labs, where you will be able to unlock multiple devices for a small fee (in case you don't need to distribute apps in the Marketplace - exactly your situation). Otherwise, your only official choice is the AppHub unlock.
You must register as a developer, for which you have to pay the $99 registration fee. However, the new AppHub update gives you the ability to deploy your apps to the phones in your enterprise at no further cost, and they do NOT have to be developer unlocked.
You have two options. First is the private beta, in which you can have up to 99 people get your app before it goes through certification. I don't remember if this is time-limited or not. Second, is after your app gets certified, you can publish it as a hidden app, and only those people that you want to be able to install the app can. No one else can even see it in Marketplace.
Don't mess with unlocking the phones you want to put the app on - the best way is to go through the process and publish the apps as hidden.