A little late, but it should be announced here too...
Today’s an especially great day to be a developer. We’re very excited to announce the last significant milestone in the rollout of the Windows Store before the general availability of Windows 8 on October 26. The Store is now open for app submissions from all developers – individuals and companies – in our supported markets, and we’ve added 82 more app submission markets! Now, developers from 120 markets can publish Windows Store apps. Ted Dworkin, Partner Program Manager for the Store, authored this post.
--Antoine
Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsstore/archive/2012/09/11/windows-store-now-open-to-all-developers.aspx
About two weeks ago the Windows Store was opened and with the upcoming general availability of Windows 8 in October, it seems that it was good timing.
In addition to the store being opened, Microsoft also announced that the MSDN, BizSpark and DreamSpark will get a 1-year Windows Store developer account.
That's a different tact than what we saw for the Windows Phone 7, where we didn't get that subscription included.
We're already seeing new apps showing up faster and faster, so with the addition of 86 more markets we're only going to see more apps than ever available.
Since i'm now back on a Windows 8 platform (was out for about a month) I'm going to start blogging more content around the Windows 8 developer experience.
Next stop for me...get my hands on a Windows 8 surface device as quickly as possible :)
Keep coding!