How to launch the Marketplace in the Windows Phone 7 Emulator

You probably noticed by now that the default Windows Phone 7 emulator only contains Internet Explorer and the Settings. I stumbled upon a tip from Daniel Vaughan about Launchers and Choosers today and I learned about a task that can start up the Marketplace Hub. Unfortunately you will have to create an application that calls into the Launcher API to accomplish this.

Here’s what you need to do:

1) Create a new Silverlight Windows Phone Application
2) In your MainPage.cs and add a using directive to the Microsoft.Phone.Tasks namespace.
3) Add the following in the constructor of MainPage.cs after calling the InitializeComponent() method:

var task = new MarketplaceHubTask();
task.ContentType = MarketplaceContentType.Applications;
task.Show();

4) Launch the application and you should be good to go.

Here’s how the Marketplace looks like on the emulator:

You can read more about Launchers and Choosers here.