4 replies to this topic

[svendb]

Hello all,

I recently received the honour () of maintaining & modifying a whole bunch of VB6 applications.

Most of these applications have MSI setups created with Visual Studio Installer 1.1.

While cleaning up the project, I ran into a litte problem with shortcuts.

The original MSI didn't create any shortcuts. The users had to create them theirselves. I modified the Visual Studio Installer project so the shortcuts are created during installation.

So far, everything works fine.

One of the application can be started by just opening the application, or by specifying a filename as a parameter.

When the application was installed as before, and the users created their own shortcuts, they could drag a file onto the shortcut to launch the program.

However, since I added the shortcuts to the installer, this feature doesn't work anymore (when viewing the properties of the shortcut, the target fields is readonly and contains only the name of the application, not the full path).

Does anyone know if this behaviour is by design & whether it can be changed?

Thanks for your help.

Sven

[Stefan Krueger]

This is called an Advertised Shortcut which supports auto-repair. I don't know why drag&drop doesn't work there and whether that's a bug or by design. You can set the DISABLEADVTSHORTCUTS property to 1 to force the old-style (non-advertised) shortcuts

[svendb]

Thank you. This is exactly what I'm looking for.

Does this property always affect all shortcuts in the project, or is there a way to specify which shortcuts should be affected by it?

Sven

[Stefan Krueger]

This property will globally affect all shortcuts in your setup. You can also specify this on a per-shortcut basis, by entering the appropriate information in the Shortcut table (see MSI documentation for the details) but I don't think you can do this in the Visual Studio UI.

[svendb]

Great, thanks a lot.

It's no problem that I can't set it from the VS UI. I created a command Line utility that allows me to pass an msi file & a SQL statement to execute on that file. I can put the build of the MSI & the update of msi in a build script.

Sven