Wireless podcast sync on Windows Phone 7 outside USA–yes we can!

Sorry! No code here as well, but a usability tip.

Mango RTM came, the Dutch Marketplace went live, I nuked my HTC7 Pro and finally used my age-old live id as primary live id. I registered my credit card and bought my first apps. Now I knew in advance not all the cool features that were available when I still was running my fake live id based on a random ZIP code in Texas (I think) would still be there when I switched live id, but I was not prepared for was the fact that the whole podcast Marketplace part was missing. Fortunately there is a work-around for this: Zune downloads anything you know the RSS for. So if you want to listen to Windows Dev Podcast as I do every week, you just enter their RSS feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/WindowsPhoneDevPodcast) and boom, Zune starts loading their podcasts.

But now I was back to downloading episodes via Zune again by attaching my phone to my computer. I was just getting used to letting the phone taking care of that – as soon as it was in Wi-Fi range of my home it started to check for new episodes and lo and behold, automagically Lowdermilk & Lowdermilk appeared on my phone, just as the DotNed podcast, Windows Phone Radio and more.

Turns out that once you have one episode downloaded on your phone via Zune, you can then start synching via Wi-Fi again. It’s dead simple.

• Once you have synced a podcast episode over an USB cable via the Zune program to your phone, disconnect it
• Open Zune on your phone
• Tap “podcasts”
• Tap the descriptive text of the podcast on the right, not the logo
• You will get a list of downloaded episodes (default Zune downloads 3).
• And a button “subscribe”

And then you are where you were before you lost the podcast Marketplace. Tap it, and you are basically done. From now on your phone will sync podcast episodes over Wi-Fi again. If this is by design or by accident, I don’t know, but it works.