How-to: Play with MarketPlace Detail Task in Windows Phone

In this short tutorial we are going to see how to use the Market place detail task, with this task we can get the complete detail of a specified application. Market Place Detail task opens the Market Place Client application and searched for the application to show the detail information on the application. If the application name is not specified it takes the application from which the task is called so that it pulls the calling applications detail. Let us see the steps on how to achieve this task in real time for a Windows phone application.

Open Visual Studio 2010 IDE and create a new Silverlight for Windows Phone project with a valid project name as shown in the screen below. Once the project is created add some controls which are used to trigger the MarketPlace Detail Task as shown in the screen below.

Now drag and drop few controls to the screen which is used to trigger event that launches the Market Place Detail Task with the required Content type and Content Identifier specified by the end user. Once we designed the screen with the controls we can see the screen looks like below.

Now we need to write our code in the button click event to trigger the Market Place Detail task on the user click. To do that just go to the code behind and first add the USING handler code on top with the existing using statements as shown in the code below.

using Microsoft.Phone.Tasks;

Next is to add the below code to the button click event which basically creates an instance of the Market place Detail task and provide a content type (basically as Application or Music) and a search filter (the Contentidentifier which is the application unique id – you can find the application content identifier id from the application URL) which categorizes and pulls the data (complete details) from the market place as shown in the code below.

Code:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Net;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Controls;
using System.Windows.Documents;
using System.Windows.Input;
using System.Windows.Media;
using System.Windows.Media.Animation;
using System.Windows.Shapes;
using Microsoft.Phone.Controls;
using Microsoft.Phone.Tasks;

namespace F5debugHowto15
{
    public partial class MainPage : PhoneApplicationPage
    {
        // Constructor
        public MainPage()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }

        private void button1_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
        {
            MarketplaceDetailTask mpdetail = new MarketplaceDetailTask();
            mpdetail.ContentIdentifier = "7c61caea-943d-4716-a436-29ba6f35a7bb";
            mpdetail.ContentType = MarketplaceContentType.Applications;
            mpdetail.Show();
        }
    }
}

Content Identifier – 7c61caea-943d-4716-a436-29ba6f35a7bb ( We have got this from the deep link url of the Windows Phone application which we uploaded and certified in the market place) we have temporarily hardcoded in the code behind.

Now we are done with our code, just run the application by pressing F5 directly from the keyboard or we can use the Build and execute the project option from the tool bar to run the application. Once the Build is successful we can see the Windows Phone emulator with the application and the expected outputs as shown in the screens below.

Output Screens:

So in this article we have seen how to use the Market Place Detail task, with which we can query the details of an application like the application description, name, screenshots etc. That’s it from this short tutorial on Windows Phone see you all in the next tutorial soon. Mean while Happy Programming!!!