IE Pinned Sites Part 10: Pinned Site Resources

Article
05/12/2011

I like to close a blog post series with a list of resources for further exploration. In that spirit, here’s some great info on site pinning and Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorer Sites

These websites showcase everything that the latest version of IE can do. You can also download IE from these sites.

https://ietestdrive.com/

https://beautyoftheweb.com/

Development Resources

IE Developer Center on MSDN – portal of Internet Explorer developer resources

Pinned Sites on the MSDN Developer Center – great resources including tutorials, case studies, technical articles, and videos

Pinned Site Developer Documentation – nice “How to do X” explanations and samples

Pinned Site API Cookbook – this was written in the IE9 Beta timeframe, but still gives a good overview.

Blogs for IE development

IE Engineering Team blog

Specifically, here is the post introducing pinned sites.

The IE-specific posts on my blog

For the other blog posts in this pinned site series, see the list at the end of this blog post.

The IE-specific posts on Jon Box’s blog

A Simple IE9 Site Pinning Pattern, and One Gotcha – good site pinning tips
IE9: Changes to Jump Lists, some good and some great – covers how to make a jump list item open in something other than a new tab in the current window, info on checking for first run, and changes to dynamic jump list categories between the Beta and RC releases of IE9

Two of my peers, Brandon and Clark, also focus on web development, so their blogs are great resources for all things web (including but not limited to Internet Explorer).

Demos

If you’d like to explore pinned sites a little more, there are several pinned site demos on https://www.ietestdrive.com. Specifically:

Pin Site Catalog – showcase of some popular websites that have implemented pinned site features
Pin Site Radio – pinned site example that utilizes thumbnail toolbar buttons and dynamic jump list categories. This demo also highlights 3 features that were new in the RC (release candidate) build of IE9: the ability to define an image in your page that can be dragged to pin your website to the Taskbar, the code that allows sites to determine if this is the first time a user has launched a Pinned Site after installation, and the two new navigation models for Jump List Task and Custom List Items where websites can define if the new page should navigate in-place, open a new window, or continue to open in a new tab (default).
Site Pinning – demos for jump list categories, overlay icons, thumbnail buttons, and jump list tasks & navigation button colors.

Webcasts/Videos

Israel Hilerio’s session from PDC 2010 – a fabulous hour-long session on site pinning with great demos

Jennifer Marsman on “Technology and Friends” – a 27-min long introduction to site pinning (this is all conversation and no screenshots, as the television studio where we recorded didn’t have internet access)

Internet Explorer Videos – these videos contain a wide range of IE topics, not limited to site pinning

Labs

IE Pinned Site Lab – I wrote an Internet Explorer site pinning lab as part of the Windows Development Boot Camp event series that I ran. (By the way, if there is a Boot Camp in your area, that is also a great resource to learn.) In this lab, you take some website starter code (which happens to be from the Windows Development Boot Camp website), and add pinned site functionality to it. Some quick tips:

Don’t forget to extract the files before you open the solution! Some folks at the Boot Camps would navigate into the .zip file using Windows Explorer and try to open the solution while it was still zipped.
If you are running the Visual VB or C# Express edition of Visual Studio, you will not be able to open the project since it’s a web project. Visual Web Developer Express should work.

jQuery Site Pinning Plugin

My teammates Brandon Satrom and Clark Sell wrote a jQuery plugin for site pinning, which you can download from https://ie9ify.codeplex.com/ or from https://plugins.jquery.com/project/pinify. The plugin was formerly called “ie9ify” and is now called “pinify”. Brandon wrote a detailed blog post describing the plugin at https://www.userinexperience.com/post/Applify-Your-Sites-with-Pinned-Sites-and-ie9ify-the-IE9-jQuery-Plugin.aspx.

Questions, Comments, and Feedback

IE Connect Site – this is the best place to submit your Internet Explorer feature requests or any bugs that you may find.

IE Development Forums – this is the place to ask your Internet Explorer development questions!

IE on Twitter – follow the news and add your comments

Other Blog Posts in this Series

IE Pinned Sites Part 1: What Are Pinned Sites?

IE Pinned Sites Part 2: Why Implement Pinned Sites?

IE Pinned Sites Part 3: How to implement basic site properties

IE Pinned Sites Part 4: How to implement Jump List Tasks

IE Pinned Sites Part 5: How to implement dynamic Jump List Categories