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?

It has been a while since I last updated the WP7 Review Reader. The tool is used by a vast amount of developers generating 15K-20K pageviews a month. Since some features were still missing and some features needed fixing I decided to quickly put together an updated version. Here’s the list of added features and fixes:

• Fixed the number of reviews since last update count
• Fixed CSV export
• Now loads all reviews for a marketplace, instead of just the first 100
• Improved overall performance

The update is now live at http://wp7reviews.tomverhoeff.com/ Is there any feature you currently miss? Or do you have any other feedback? Feel free to contact me by using the comments, the contact page or through Twitter

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!

Last friday i did a Windows Phone 7 introduction in front of about 500 students in Doetinchem. Since this blogpost is pointed at the students who attended, it will be presented in Dutch. Stay tuned for some more WP7 articles in English. Afgelopen vrijdag organiseerde Microsoft in samenwerking met het Graafschap College een ochtend met technische sessies voor MBO-studenten uit de regio Doetinchem. In het Amphion waren uiteindelijk ruim 500 studenten aanwezig voor een sessie van Tony Krijnen en Daniel van Soest over Windows 2008 R2/Windows 7 en aansluitend een sessie van mij over Windows Phone 7.  Gelukkig heb ik al veel enthousiaste reacties gekregen, wel hebben een aantal studenten aangegeven graag wat meer informatie te willen om eens rustig aan de slag te kunnen met Windows Phone 7. In deze blogpost vinden jullie alle benodigde informatie.

Yesterday my MSP colleagues in Eindhoven organised a lunchbreak event as a kickoff towards the rest of the year. Together with study society GEWIS they managed to attract around 90 students, so the event was a success before it event started. The event would consist of two parts. The first 45 minutes would be filled by me talking about Windows Phone 7 and application development followed by the Eindhoven MSPs introducing themselves, the MSP programme and possible benefits for the students.