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.

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.

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.

It’s been about 2 weeks since the first Windows Phone 7 devices became available and the Windows Phone 7 Applications Marketplace officially launched. This means consumers now have access to all the applications and for us developers this means our products (apps) can actually be sold. Unfortunately Microsoft does not provide easy access to reviews on the marketplaces just yet, all you can do is fire up the Zune software and check out the ratings in your local marketplace. I discussed this issue with Matthijs Hoekstra and have been trying to find a solution during the last few days.Fortunately i found one: