In the latest version of Internet Explorer users now have the option to pin a tab to the taskbar. It works like a favorite, but just one click away instead of having to open the browser first.

Pinning a tab is a nice feature, but they didn’t stop there, these pinned pages can also supply custom jumplists to make access to common tasks even friendlier.

To demonstrate this feature I added a jumplist to our own product Provisior

Provisior uses a MasterPage to define the overall layout of the site. This is where the custom jumplist lives as well.

This is what a jumplist item looks like in the HTML source:

<meta name="msapplication-task" content="name=Mijn Info;action-uri=http://localhost/Celerior.Annapurna.UI/MyInfo.aspx;icon-uri=http://localhost/Celerior.Annapurna.UI/App_Themes/Light/Icon/myinfo.ico" />

Just another meta in the page head section, easy enough. But what about dynamic jumplist items? Here’s how I take care of that:

In the MasterPage codebehind I created a simple method that adds a new <meta /> to the page header. Note that the head section in the aspx needs to have the runat=”server” attribute set to programmatically manipulate the header.

private void addMeta(string name, string content)

        {

            var m = new HtmlMeta();

            m.Name = name;

            m.Content = content;

            Page.Header.Controls.Add(m);

        }

To add the jumplist item I can now write the following in the MasterPage Page_Load event:

addMeta("msapplication-task", "name=Mijn Info;action-uri=" + webHost + "/MyInfo.aspx;icon-uri=" + iconPath + "myinfo.ico");

The code above outputs the <meta /> in the first codesnippet.

In the Page_Load you can now write anything you want about when the jumplist items are shown.

There are some other tricks you can do like set the name of the jumplist and the size of the browser window when the site is launched from the taskbar:

<meta name="application-name" content="Provisior" />

<meta name="msapplication-window" content="width=1024;height=768" />

There is also a way to do all this in Javascript but I’ll let you discover that on your own (Here is a good start )

To see some of these jumplists in action, try pinning Twitter or Facebook to your taskbar and right-clicking the icons.

Have fun!