A question come up on the App Hub forums a few days back and I thought it would be an interesting one to talk through.  The question was along the following lines:

1. Is there a way to capture reviews of your application?
2. What is the general user a opinion about ‘Nag’ screens that pop up asking for a product review as seen in some iPhone Applications
3. What is an acceptable method when asking for Reviews i.e ‘Nag’ screen verse passive link

To answer these questions we need to look at the MarketplaceReviewTask and Windows Phone 7 Application Certification Requirements. - Note you can always find the latest version of the application certification requirements over on App Hub 

1. Is there a way to capture reviews of your application?

First I some people may wonder why would you want a review, well – allowing users to review your application will help (well depends on the review ) you stand out in what will eventually become a very competitive marketplace.  Good reviews will ultimately help to drive downloads of your application.   To provide the user the ability to review you application the Microsoft.Phone.Tasks namespace provides the  MarketplaceReviewTask specifically for this reason.  Now before we jump to the code for implementing this I think it is first important to talk through the remainder of the questions.

2. What is the general user a opinion about ‘Nag’ screens that pop up asking for a product review as seen in some iPhone Applications?

 I for one am definitely not keen on nag screens of any description, for the simple reason that they can be annoying and can turn someone from enjoying their in app experience and by extension, for many non tech users, their windows phone 7 experience.

3. What is an acceptable method when asking for Reviews i.e ‘Nag’ screen verse passive link

The general rule of thumb here is that the Windows Phone 7 Application Certification Requirements detail whats ok and whats not ok.  But like any document its difficult to put in every single thing upfront and as a result documents evolve over time.  Currently there is no mention of MarketplaceReviewTask nag screens.  However as a developer I would urge you not to take such a path.  On one hand you may get your reviews through brute force nagging but on the otherhand you may just frustrate your users until they uninstalling the app (I would) or writing a bad review.  In my opinion as devs we need to keep in mind that applications play a big role in the success of WP7 adoption.  If we can have happy rather then frustrated users then we are in a good position to continue moving forward.   Thats why i like the suggestion in the forum of using a passive Submit a Review link in the application and  here is how you would implement it in code.

To implement you use the Microsoft.Phone.Tasks; namesplace and the MarketplaceReviewTask.

In your page add the following XAML:

<HyperlinkButton Content="Submit A Review" Height="30" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Margin="225,665,0,0" Name="btnSubmitReview" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="200" Click="btnSubmitReview_Click" />

In the code code behind of your page add:

using Microsoft.Phone.Tasks;

and add code to your handler as follows:

private void btnSubmitReview_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
{
     MarketplaceReviewTask review = new MarketplaceReviewTask();
     review.Show();
}

The end result is as follows:

MarketplaceReviewTask

Note:
1. The MarketplaceReviewTask will cause your application to be tombstoned so you will need to add handing for that.
2. Running this in the emulator will display a warning/error dialog.

Enjoy,
Nick