Today I described a trick for Windows Phone how to increase the numbers but also the average rating of your app. It worked very well for the my rubber duck app I wrote. A little over 11000 downloads with over 1000 reviews is a ratio of 1:11 which is very good. The trick is to ask people to review your app (and provide them a very simple way to do it) after they start your app 5 times.

UPDATED (18-1-2012): Jason mentioned in the comments this doesn’t work for Windows Phone 8. He is absolutely right. If you check the documentation on MSDN http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsphone/develop/ms598674(v=vs.105) it tells you for Windows Phone 8 you can’t use the MessageBox.Show in the Application_Launching event. So you should place your code in the OnNavigatedTo event of your first page. I changed the code below to reflect that. One of the really important things people look for when looking for an app is good rated apps.

Update: make sure you follow this post when finished cloning your drive otherwise WHS won’t run as you would expect. One of my colleagues Homeserver crashed and he doesn’t have the restore DVD anymore. I happen to have an EX470 homeserver from HP as well. My colleague asked to copy the C drive (that’s the only drive HomeServer doesn’t create a duplicate for). Lars Stolwijk recommended using EaseUS ToDo backup to clone a disk on twitter.

Since Windows Phone 8 supports NFC I wanted to see what I could do with it. I ordered a bunch of NFC stickers online from Special Line. You can use your own app to program the stickers but there are also a few in the store already. NFC Interactor or NFC Launchit. NFC Interactor is the most flexible but you need to do most of the configuration yourself. NFC Launchit has a lot of predefined action you can write to your tag (but only app launches) for example go to your wifi settings or Kid’s corner.

Around the end of the year we will get the final calculations from our energy supplier and you will know if your monthly bill was too high or too low the last year. My energy bill is quite expensive I think and that has mostly to do with me using a lot of energy (and all the taxes of course). When I log in to the website of Eneco I can see what the average usage of houses in my neighborhood is.

Why not describe how I installed this blog? Perhaps you are surprised I run this blog on WordPress while I am working at Microsoft 🙂 that’s ok but I like to play around with other stuff than just Microsoft technology. It helps me being informed about what people are also using (and yes I know not the entire world is using Microsoft technology) and WordPress actually runs perfectly fine on Microsoft Azure.

Yes, finally, after many years I am starting my own blog on my own domain hoekstraonline.net. I have been blogging for a while on my Microsoft blog but I decided this holiday I wanted to blog in English (the MS blog is only Dutch) and want to write about more than just the MS work I do. I will still be posting on my MS blog and perhaps do some crosspostings once in a while too.