Yesterday Microsoft announced that marketplaces in 13 new countries were opening up. Today I am happy to announce that support for those new marketplaces has been added to the WP7 Review Reader tool. The tool keeps helping out developers to get easy access to their reviews by simply entering the AppId and bookmarking the URL. For more information on the Review Reader, please see the previous posts on this subject. Some of you might have also noticed that I’ve gone a little silent on my blog and twitter recently. I’m trying to catch up, but there are some important WP7 projects that require my full attention at the moment. I will be releasing some brand new Windows Phone apps targeted at the Dutch market in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for more news on that part.

Last Friday I presented a session at the Dutch Microsoft DevDays in the Hague. It was a tips & tricks session about earning money with Windows Phone 7 apps in which I covered everything except the app development itself. Subjects covered included the marketplace submission process, trial & marketplace tasks, advertising, reports & feedback and runtime intelligence. The goal was to provide a high-level overview of the different aspects of making money with WP7 applications to motivate all developers to spend just a little more time thinking about marketing their app. My session has been recorded and will be published on Channel9 later this week, it was presented in Dutch and therefore probably irrelevant to most of the world 😉

I will publish some in-depth blogposts covering marketplace submission, trial mode, marketplace tasks, advertising, reports & feedback and runtime intelligence during this and next week. I blogged about implementing trial mode back in December, but I will also publish a new and improved post on this subject. This years DevDays have been yet another great experience and I want to thank everyone for making it happen, especially Arie Leeuwesteijn and Matthijs Hoekstra. It has been great catching up with the Dutch WP7 community and other speakers. See you all next year!

It’s a problem encountered by every (WP7) app developer: users leaving reviews and there’s just no way to contact them. How often did you want to clarify features misunderstood by a user? Or just want to let the user know you appreciate the input and will consider their feedback for a future update? A while ago Silverlight MVP and PicturesLab developer Rene Schulte shared his manual way of contacting reviewers through Zune social on his blog. Although this works in only 50% of the cases it is the best method I am currently aware off. Therefore I decided to integrate messaging users with the existing WP7 Review Reader I built a while ago. This provides developers with an easy way of contacting their customers. Here’s how to use it:

Three months ago i released the Windows Phone 7 Review Reader to give WP7 developers easy access to their app reviews all over the world. It was meant to be a temporary solution until the App Hub was updated with extra features like accessing app reviews. During the last 90 days we’ve seen some big improvements to the App Hub (download numbers, for starters) but we are still waiting for some extra features. My little tool already had over 50K pageviews since its launch on the 2nd of November so it should be clear that developers want this information. To fill the gap that’s still left by Microsoft i will start to add new features to the review reader on a regular basis starting today.