Since the beginning of the iPhone SDK beta the Program Portals Distribution page has been empty. With today’s announcments at WWDC and the release of iPhone SDK beta 7 these pages have been populated.

The distribution page now has three tabs, Application, App Store and Ad Hoc.

The Application tab gives instructions on how to build your application for submission to the App Store.

1. Create and download an iPhone Distribution Certificate
2. Create and download your iPhone Distribution Provisioning Profile
3. Build your application bundle with Xcode for distribution

As you can see a new type of certificate has been added.

The App Store tab tells us that we will use a web-based tool called iTunes Connect to submit applications to the App Store.

“In addition to submitting your application, you can also check the status of yoru contract, manage users, and submit application metadata through iTunes Connect.”

The following metadata is required:

1. Application Name
2. Application Description (up to 4000 characters)
3. Device type(s) the application is designed for (iPhone and/or iPod touch)
4. Unique Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) for each major version of your application
5. Primary Category
6. Secondary Category (Optional)
7. Game Rating (Optional)
8. Unique Version #
9. Application copyright holder
10. Support URL for the Company
11. Support Email Address (for use by Apple only)
12. End User License Agreement (Optional) If a EULA is not provided, standard iTunes App Store EULA will be applied.
13. Territories application to be distributed in
14. Application Availability Date
15. Application Price
16. Localization desired (English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese)

Plus you’ll need to supply an icon for the iPhone home screen that is 57×57 pixels, a large 512×512 pixel 72 DPI image that will be displayed on the App Store and a screenshot of the application.

Information about iTunes Connect will be provided soon.

The Ad Hoc tab only has the following blurb: “More information about Ad Hoc Distribution will be available soon.” I assume this is for distributing corporate applications.

Thanks for byteCoder for the clarification on Ad Hoc Distribution: “Ad Hoc” distribution will enable iPhone developers and educators to certify up to 100 iPhones for a particular application.