Getting your app into the Windows Store increases the chances of profitability, but until now it’s not been possible to work out what’s gone wrong if an app fails certification.

Microsoft has now made the process a little more transparent. If your app fails certification because it crashed or didn’t respond during the certification process, Microsoft will send you a crash file with the certification report.

According to the Windows 8 app developer blog the crash file comes in one of two formats:

• A crash dump (.dmp) file contains critical info about the crashed application. These can be opened in Visual Studio 2012 or with Microsoft’s Windows Debugger Tools.
• An ErrorInfo (.txt) file contains info about crashes related to an unhandled JavaScript exception.

You can also access crash data for published apps through the Quality reports available in your Windows Store Dashboard.

Meanwhile, the number of apps that have successfully been added to the Windows Store for Windows 8 has now reached 40,000, according to MetroStore’s Scanner.

MetroStore Scanner collects data on apps in the Windows Store in Windows 8, and shows that more than 5,000 apps have been added since Christmas.

This is a drop from the pre-Christmas period, when 14,557 apps were added in the 35 days leading up to the point where 35,000 apps in total had been recorded. During this period, 415 new Windows 8 apps were being added each day, presumably in the hope of  attracting new buyers of Windows 8 devices over the holiday season.

That figure has now dropped to just 156 apps per day.