How to launch Metro IE from Metro App

Question

I want to have the user click on a hyperlink button and launch the Metro IE to navigate to a url. I'm missing something in the API, because I'm not seeing how to do this. Is this supported? Or is there a more generic approach where you just tell Windows API to open the link and it determine's how the user wants me to open it? Help please.

Answer 1

Yes - just indirectly.  You need to handle Click and then manually launch the browser using:

Windows.System.Launcher.LaunchDefaultProgram(new Uri(yourLink));

Joe

 

Answer 2

Thanks Joe, that worked perfectly.

Answer 3

In the RTM tools the API has changed, for Windows Store metro apps the following code is necessary:

using Windows.System;

...

        /// <summary>
        /// Displays the privacy policy in the browser.
        /// </summary>
        public async void ShowPrivacyPolicy()
        {
            await Launcher.LaunchUriAsync(new Uri("http://www.mywebserver.com/MyPrivacyPolicyPath"));
        }

Also weird was that unless I added "Windows.System" with a using statement it did not resolve the Launcher class. This was on a clean Win8 Pro OS and VS2012 build I just installed.

---

Key Artefacts