I received my first Windows Phone Marketplace notification today, which leads me to a topic that’s not covered in the book: What happens when an app you’ve downloaded and installed needs to be updated. Let’s take a look.

First, as you might expect, the Marketplace live tile will display a notification noting how many apps are ready to be updated. In this case, there is a single update available.

When you launch Marketplace, there’s another notification of a pending update at the bottom of the main view.

Tap that “1 update” text and you’re brought to a new screen (to me, at least): App Updates. From here, you can tap an individual app to update just that, or tap the Update All button to update them all. Since there’s just one update now, they both do the same thing in this case.

If you click Update All, a Queuing… message appears mid-screen.  If you click the app name, you’re brought to the app page on the Marketplace, and there’s an Update button at the bottom. Either way, the result is the same…

It doesn’t work. :)

Maybe because the Marketplace is still in a state of flux, or maybe because they’re literally testing this feature, the update fails with the following message:

Can’t get this info right now. Check back in a little while.

There’s a Close button. End of story.

So I guess I’ll have to update this post later. Right now, this is still a work in progress.

Imagine trying to write a book about this mess. :)