In a nice follow up to those Marketplace revisions, Microsoft has just announced that they will allow developers to identify and interact with beta testers for their software via the Marketplace for Windows Phone 7.
Up till now, the question of whether some mechanism for developers to let the public test their program before release was unanswered. With no side-loading available for software installation, it's only through the Marketplace can the public add software to their phones, so some structure in the Marketplace had to be defined.
The mechanism will work via a "deep link" sent by email to the testers and presumably their Windows Live ID will be tagged by the Marketplace to grab the download. In addition, Microsoft is looking for a similar expansion of this public/private "cloud" distribution system to be applied for corporate environments, where they need to roll out their own proprietary software to employees. This latter part is important for the future success of WP7 in the business sector.
Once again, this is a great move by Microsoft and we're glad to see this becoming available.
Read the rest of Charlie Kindel's post on the Windows Team Blog.
