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Problematic sign up process with WP7 dev

I recently purchansed a Nokia Lumia 800 and was very excited with the prospects of developing apps on it. I probably did a dumb thing by not doing some information gathering before I actually purchased the mobile. When I first got the cell, I installed WP7 development tools on my machine. Created my first ‘Hello world’ app and was all excited to run it and things went far far down south from there.

First thing – The WP7 emulator needs the developer key. The error message is quite cryptic. It does not say something like ‘Please enter your developer key as retrieved from AppHub’ but instead gives an error code. Alright, I googled the error and figured out that I need to get the key from AppHub. I set off to sign up on it…

Second thing goes wrong. I realized I need to pay to become a developer. WTF!!! Alright! Im ready to pay. Lets get it done with. I go to the payment details and my country is selected as US which is not my country now, but it was an year ago. I don’t have any more money in my US credit cards so I wanted to change the country, but whatdyaknow…. You can’t. Now how am I supposed to pay?

I go update my windows live account and try again. This time I get an error:

Unable to complete your request
We cannot complete your request now, please try again later.
Message 40001
Hmmm… Alright. Very helpful indeed! Exactly what I was looking for!!! Idiots.
So I googled this error and it looks like I need to email Microsoft and ‘hope’ for an answer. So I did it. I sent a very detailed email.
I reply I got was to update the payment information on Xbox.com! Alright. Microsoft has definitely not thought about a proper distributed DB for their accounts. Ok… Im still going to try to get this thing working… I deal more with broken stuff than proper functional stuff in my line of work. I open my XBox account (which by the way gets created automatically, I guess, when you register your WP7 phone) and look for the country. Hmm… The messed up thing is you can’t bloody change it!!!
Now the solution is to create a new WindowsLive account that is registered in India, then reset my phone to its factory settings and log in using the new credentials… And lose all my previous settings… What bull!
I like WP7 and things… But – “Microsoft… You need to get your act together!! X( “