Yesterday I published a blog about private beta testing, one of the great new App Hub features. Although the feature itself is great part of the process can be a little frustrating. One of the things that frustrated me was the requirement to submit the full load of artwork. In the first stages of testing I usually don’t have all the artwork/screenshots finished yet, which in the end forced me to create some dummy artwork. The same holds when you don’t want your artwork to be available yet before the official launch of your application. To save some frustration in the future I will just share my dummy artwork. I did not try to give it any kind of design so it’s ugly, but at least it will be accepted by the App Hub. Feel free to use it in your beta tests. Here’s a zip containing all the files. Happy beta testing!  

A while ago Microsoft introduced a big improvement to the App Hub. Recently I gave one of the new features, private beta testing, a spin. The process is actually easier than I thought it would be. There are a few things to keep in mind though. In this post I will share a quick walkthrough for distributing your app through private beta-testing. Please pay attention to the remarks. Dutch readers might recognize the info in the post, I recently started as an editor at Dutch WP7 community and newswebsite WP7.nl where I published a similar article in Dutch

With the launch of the new App Hub Microsoft also opened up 19 new consumer markets for application submission. Developers running the Mango beta can already access the new marketplace and thus can leave reviews for applications. Therefore I updated the Review Reader with support for all new marketplaces. If you haven’t done so please make sure your applications are submitted to the new marketplaces, even if your app was set for worldwide distribution it requires manual action (see my blogpost on worldwide distribution). It’s also worthwile to note a few changes to the new App Hub that impact checking your reviews. Within the App Hub it is now possible to view reviews and average for one marketplace at a time. This is an improvement, but MS isn’t quite there yet when they want to provide easy and efficient access to reviews.  Compared to the App Hub my review reader still offers this extra functionality: – Overview of all marketplaces – No-nonsense interface – Excel/CSV export – A try at contacting the reviewers – Average ratings since last update I still hope Microsoft will improve this experience in a future update, in the meantime my tool will stay available for all WP7 devs out there. Please let me know if you have any feedback or feature suggestions. You can find me on Twitter.

A while ago the App Hub got updated with some great new features. Having returned from a little holiday yesterday I decided to give the private beta feature a shot for a new app I am working on. Unfortunately the App Hub kept giving me the useless “An error occured connecting to the server. Please try again later” exception. I tried all the obvious workarounds: waited a while, tried other browsers, cleared my cache, but with no success. As a last resort before contacting support I figured my favorite tool Fiddler might help. Since the App Hub is a silverlight app, that obviously runs locally, capturing the web traffic could give some extra insight. To my surprise Fiddler gave me all the information I needed. Obviously this is something the App Hub should have shown, since the info is right there, but for the time being I’ll show you how to figure it out for yourself using Fiddler.

Today I finally took some time to check out the recent update to the App Hub. I have to say, Microsoft deserves some credits here. A lot of annoyances that existed before have been fixed. Still there’s some work left to be done. The biggest question: What happened to worldwide distribution?

About 6 weeks ago I released the first version of WP7NL Apps to the marketplace. An application that would provide a seperate place for Dutch content on the Windows Phone marketplace as long as we have to life without our own marketplace. The app received quite some attention online which led to over 1000 downloads as of the 14th of May. For an app specifically targeted at the Dutch market this isn’t bad at all (but of course we can do better). In this post I would like to share some statistics and I am also to happy to finally announce the next update.

After countless hours of work you finally finished your amazing WP7 app. The first thing you think of now is getting the application out on the marketplace as soon as possible. Unfortunately many developers still waste the potential of their application by not taking time to carefully think about how users are going to find and use their application. Taking a little extra time to think about marketing will pay off in the end. The whole process of getting your app published is quite straightforward, but in this post I will cover some of the things I came across that you might want to consider. This is one out of a series of follow-up posts to my session at the Dutch DevDays.

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!

A few days ago i announced the upcoming application “WP7NL Apps”. The app will provide easy access to all currently available WP7 apps published from the Netherlands. I just got notified that version 1.0 has passed testing and will be available in the marketplace within a few hours. Matthijs Hoekstra provided a list of all Dutch applications, so the app will list all 144 apps and their 72 publishers. Please note that this is version 1.0 and an improved version 1.1 has already been submitted. This will fix list tombstoning and contains some minor improvements. Direct link The feedback I received on this concept has been very positive and some people suggested some other countries could also benefit from an app like this. It would be great to provide an app to other countries. If you would like to help to get an app in your country out, please get in touch with me. Basically all i need is a list of AppIds which your local Microsoft representative might be able to provide.  

It has been half a year since the first Windows Phone 7 devices went on sale in the Netherlands. While we are still awaiting the launch of our localized marketplace the group of early adaptors is growing. With over 450 registered developers and over 120 published apps there is a decent community supporting WP7. Unfortunately all Dutch users are forced to choose one of the foreign marketplaces to be able to download applications. This has one big disadvantage, Dutch apps never get the attention they deserve. What we need is our own spot within the international marketplaces and that is exactly what the “WP7NL Apps” application is going to provide.