How do I programmatically access files in Windows Phone 7's Office Hub / Extend the Office Hub

Question

I have developed a PDF Converter / Viewer for Windows Phone 7, but it is rather useless unless it can get the source files (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc) from somewhere.

An obvious place to get these files from is the Office hub on the phone, but there doesn't appear to be a documented way to access these files programmatically. I can only access my own application's files using IsolatedStorage.

Alternatively I would like to extend the functionality of the Office Hub with an extra button to convert a file, but I am not sure this is possible either.

Naturally I can retrieve files from a SharePoint Server, but I prefer not to do this unless I absolutely have to. Alternatively is there a way to map my application to a file extension so email attachments can be loaded into it?

Any brilliant ideas? How does the official PDF Viewer from Acrobat deal with this?

Answer 1

I'm afraid it's not possible using the SDK to accomplish any of these ideas for files stored on the phone.

The closest to load a pdf / office document from an app into the corresponding Adobe or Office application is to publish the documents on a server and link to them through a web page shown from your app. This probably doesn't suit your requirements though.

The official one does this utilising capabilities not available through the 3rd party SDK that we use.