Implementing Website Pinning in ASP.NET

Internet Explorer 9 introduced a new feature - Pinned Websites - that allows you to create a shortcut to a website on Windows 7 taskbar. A pinned website, however, exposes much more functionality than an ordinary shortcut. Normally to launch a website, the user needs to open a browser instance, type in website URL in the browser address bar and then navigate to the required part of the website. Pinning a website allows the user to launch it much like a desktop application. The user can simply click on the icon of the pinned website or select a specific option from a menu and start working with the website. Since a pinned website is always visible on the taskbar, website pinning also grabs constant user attention. This can result in significant increase in the usage of the website for obvious reasons. No wonder that every ASP.NET developer would like to take advantage of this feature in their websites. To that end this article discusses various steps involved in enabling pinning for your website. It also illustrates creating static and dynamic task entries and discusses a few other scenarios specific to ASP.NET.