StoreClient is a Portable Class Library that will allow you to acces the data used in the Windows Phone Store app. Allowing you to search for music (albums, artists) and apps. The client also gives you methods for getting the image URLs needed to display the same images that the Store app uses.

My own licence for this is use it as much as you want, do what you want. However, at present, it uses the HttpClient package for portable class libraries, which doesn't yet have a Go Live licence, so really, no one can use it in a production app. Please bear this in mind until Microsoft say it's ok.

Basically, .NET 4.0+, Silverlight 4+, Windows Phone (7 and 8), Windows Store.

Installing this can be done through nuget, just use the following command:

Install-Package StoreClient -pre

Usage is very simple and uses the async/await methodology.

A simple search:

var client = new StoreApiClient();
var results = await client.SearchAsync("The Dark Knight", includeArtists: false, includeTracks: false);

Getting an album's image URL:

var client = new StoreApiClient();
var url = client.CreateAlbumArtUrl("534be700-0000-0000-0000-000000000000");

Get an app's icon (the one that appears in the store):

var client = new StoreApiClient();
var url = var url = client.CreateAppImageUrl("490f05d0-ee29-4f5f-b5c9-66b48c6f63a2", ImageType.IconLarge);

• If you want, you can pass in your own implementation of an HttpMessageHandler when you create your instance of StoreApiClient, however, by default, one is used and has compression turned on.
• You can also change what country the store searches by setting the Locale property of StoreApiClient.

Sort of, it doesn't really do much yet though, will build it up a wee bit though.

I hope so. See what the future holds.

0.2.4.0

• Added support for searching the Windows Phone 7 app store and get app listings specific for that version of the OS. This is set using the WindowsPhoneStore property.

0.2.3.0

• Added the WindowsPhone81 ClientType enum

0.2.2.0

• Fixes for return types that have no entries in them
• Added WindowsPhone70 to the ClientType enum

0.2.1.0

• Added the IStoreApiClient interface to allow developers to more easily create design time data when using something like MVVM Light.

0.2.0.0 Added the following methods:

• GetAppsListAsync lets you get a list of apps with different criteria (like, new apps, apps by category etc)
• GetAppCategoriesAsync gets the list of all the app categories
• GetMusicGenresAsync gets the list of all music genres
• GetAlbumsByGenreAsync gets the list of albums for a genre
• GetArtistsByGenreAsync gets the list of artists for a genre
• GetTracksByGenreAsync gets the list of tracks for a genre based on sort criteria