How to Market yourself with your WP apps quickly?

Many of us build Windows Phone applications and we try to market ourselves and/or our apps. Writing the same code for all the apps is not a big tough but why to write? That’s why I wrote a single code file for my apps and thought to share it with you.

Let’s begin with the source code and if you have more to share for other developers, post in the comment section and help them to code easily.

We need to be more focus on the application features and quality instead of writing same code for marketing our apps. In general, we do this in the “About Page” of our application itself. So, here I brought that piece of code that I am using in my apps for you so that, you can directly use it and add your extra codes in the same place for all other apps too.

This piece of code currently does the following:

1. Returns you the Application Version.
2. Navigate to Rate & Review your app in the Marketplace.
3. Search apps based on searched terms. In general, you can specify the developer name or company which will return you the list of applications developed by that developer or company respectively.
4. Navigate to a website of your choice.
5. Navigate to Twitter to connect the user with your passed Twitter handle.
6. Navigate to Facebook to connect the user with your passed Facebook ID.
7. Provide user option to send you support question

These are the common basic functions that you must need in your application. If you need more or have any specific code to share with other developers, share it in the comments section so that, I can include them here.

Here is the code snippet for you:

namespace KunalChowdhury.Helper

{

    using System;

    using System.ComponentModel;

    using System.Reflection;

    using Microsoft.Phone.Tasks;

    public static class ApplicationHelper

    {

        public static string GetApplicationVersion()

        {

            if (DesignerProperties.IsInDesignTool)

            {

                return "version x.x.x.x";

            }

            Assembly assembly = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly();

            var name = new AssemblyName(assembly.FullName);

            return name.Version.ToString(4);

        }

        public static void ReviewApplication()

        {

            new MarketplaceReviewTask().Show();

        }

        public static void SearchMoreApps(string searchTerm)

        {

            new MarketplaceSearchTask { ContentType = MarketplaceContentType.Applications,

                                        SearchTerms = searchTerm

                                      }.Show();

        }

        public static void ViewWebsite(string websiteUrl)

        {

            new WebBrowserTask { Uri = new Uri(websiteUrl, UriKind.Absolute) }.Show();

        }

        public static void ConnectInTwitter(string twitterHandle)

        {

            new WebBrowserTask { Uri = new Uri(string.Format("http://twitter.com/{0}", 

                                               twitterHandle), UriKind.Absolute) 

                               }.Show();

        }

        public static void ConnectInFacebook(string facebookProfileID)

        {

            new WebBrowserTask { Uri = new Uri(string.Format("http://facebook.com/{0}",

                                               facebookProfileID), UriKind.Absolute)

                               }.Show();

        }

        public static void SupportQuestion(string toAddress, string subject, string body = null)

        {

            new EmailComposeTask { To = toAddress, Subject = subject, Body = body }.Show();

        }

    }

}

I hope, this will definitely help you. Use it freely in your application and don’t forget to share the app URL here to track back. All the best for your future Windows Phone application development.

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