Question

I would like to integrate with the Windows Phone 7 browser so that when the user is on a web site, he/she has the possibility to “send” the page’s URL to my app for further processing.

The behaviour I’m going after is built into Android via “Share page” action which displays to the user all installed apps that can handle a specific intent (in this case it’s a text intent containing the URL of the page).

Do you know if it’s possible to achieve something like this on the Windows Phone 7 platform?

I know that there are choosers, launchers and tasks in WP7 but what I would like is somewhat a reverse – I want my app to be able to respond to particular tasks invoked from other apps if the user wants to.

Answer 1

You cannot extend the browser that the operating system provides in the way that you describe. However, you could build an application that incorporates the WebBrowser control and provide this kind of functionality from within your application. There are already a number of custom browser applications in the Marketplace.

The Photos and Music hubs have a means of providing integrated applications, though it’s effectively just a way to get a shortcut to your application from the Application Bar’s menu in those respective hubs. It would be useful if the Browser app could be extended in the same way.