It’s no secret that Microsoft has high expectations from the new Windows Store, so the fast growth of the Windows 8 service surely pleases the Redmondians. The Windows Store recently passed the 2,000 apps milestone, despite the fact that “some apps are removed from the store periodically,” said Wes Miller, research VP at Directions of Microsoft. “Today, the Windows Store broke the 2000 app mark and arrived at 2,079 apps available internationally,” he said in a blog post. What’s more important is that Windows Store is a great source of freeware apps, as this particular software category accounts for 83 percent of the store inventory. In the meantime however, Microsoft struggles to show everybody that developing Windows 8 apps is not that hard, so it held an 18-hour coding marathon called AppFest in Bangalore, India. The event attracted nearly 2,500 developers from all over the world.