Windows Phone - link to the publisher in the app store

Question

I have created several windows phone apps and I would like to link to my publisher's page to show all of the apps that I publish. Note that I am developing my app for Windows Phone 7.x and up using C# and XAML.

UPDATE

What I would like to do is show the following publisher page: From within Windows Phone, navigate to the Windows Phone store, then select any app, then select the "more from <Publisher>" link. This displays a nice mobile view of all of that publisher's apps. But I can't figure out how to bring up that publisher page directly from within my app. Any help would be appreciated!

Option 1) Link directly to the URL for my publishers page (using a WebBrowserTask)

Issue) All links to the store seem to require the en-US language embedded in the URL. I'm concerned about what will happen to users in other countries/languages.

Example: http:/www.windowsphone.com/en-US/store/publishers?publisherId=Microsoft%2BCorporation

Is there a language independent way to link to a publisher in the store?

Option 2) Use the MarketplaceDetailTask to link to the publisher

Issue) From what I've seen, this can only be used to link to an app. I tried using my publisher GUID and got: Marketplace Error - We're sorry, but we can't complete your request right now.

MarketplaceDetailTask marketplaceDetailTask = new MarketplaceDetailTask();
marketplaceDetailTask.ContentType = MarketplaceContentType.Applications;
marketplaceDetailTask.ContentIdentifier = <My Publisher GUID>;
marketplaceDetailTask.Show();

Option 3) Use the MarketplaceSearchTask to link to the publisher

Issue) This allows searching the store with any string. The problem is, when I put my publisher name in the search string, other apps are shown in addition to mine. My publisher name includes a common word and any app with that word shows up.

MarketplaceSearchTask searchTask = new MarketplaceSearchTask();
searchTask.ContentType = MarketplaceContentType.Applications;
searchTask.SearchTerms = "<My Publisher Name>";
searchTask.Show();

Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated! Thanks.

Answer 1

As you're targeting WP7+, unfortunately using the zune:search URI only works on WP8 as it relies on URI Schemes, which was not backported to WP7. Based on these two posts, I tried the following on your behalf:

zune://search/?publisher=Henry%20Chong;

And a bunch of other things, but it seems that only zune://navigate is available on Windows Phone 7 and that only allows you to load a specific app. (Perhaps someone who feels like opening reflector or on the Phone teams could comment here...)

Two other things I've come across that you can look into:

1) There used to be an undocumented Zune api that you could query the marketplace against; it looks like this has been replaced by the Marketplace Edge Service, which you could try and dig around for:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/windowsapps/en-US/f5294fcb-f4b3-4b19-9bda-f49c6a38b327/marketplace-edge-service-query

2) You could add a specific unique keyword to all your apps and use the MarketplaceSearchTask, as suggested here by Matt.

Personally, I'd go with #2 because:

• you never know when the Marketplace Edge Service will change

• 1 is not technically supported by Microsoft

• you won't have to replicate the page you're trying to display

Of course, there's also nothing stopping you from creating your own "Apps by X" page for your app and maintain it yourself manually.

Best of luck!