How to Associate Your Web Site With Your Windows Store App

 

(And how to light up Get this App in Modern UI IE 10 or 11)

I previously posted an article on how to associate your web site with a pinned Live Tile. Today, I’m going to provide some information on how to associate your web site with your Windows Store Application so that visitors can automatically see that you have an app for your site and navigate directly to it in the Windows Store if they wish to install it.

You may have noticed in Windows 8.0 or 8.1 that using the Modern UI version of Internet Explorer that when you select the wrench icon on the AppBar, an entry named Get this App appears, but is greyed out for most sites.

As of today, when you visit Digitalmediaphile.com you will see that the site is now associated with Barb’s Connected World Blog Reader in the Windows Store.

Enabling this is easy to do (I had to hunt around to find a site actually using this as it is not really documented anywhere.)

I added two lines to header.php in my wordpress theme:

<meta name="msApplication-ID" content="App" />
<meta name="25241Digitalmediaphile.BarbsConnectedWorldBlogRead_m2thxh7x439cm" />

The first entry should be exactly as listed above. The second entry is obtained by examining a computer where the app is installed and getting the name from

C:\Users\YOUR USER NAME\AppData\Local\Packages

 

In the screen shots below, you can see that the standard wrench icon now has an extra item, signifying that there is extended functionality.

IE11 on Windows 8.1 Preview:

 

Close up view of icon:

 

IE 10 on Windows 8.0

 

If you are using the Windows 8.1 Preview and Modern IE 11, and don’t have my app installed, you will see

And on Windows 8.0, using Modern UI IE 10, you will see

 

As you’d expect, when you select Get app for this site, The Windows Store will open and display Barb’s Connected World and you can install the app.

Once my app is installed, if you happen to visit my site and are not using the associated app, you can easily switch TO my app, as shown below in the screen shot using IE 11 on Windows Preview 8.1