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Specifying Whether a Shortcut Should Be Pinned to the Windows 8 Start Screen
InstallShield 2015
Project: This information applies to the following project types:
Project-specific differences are noted where applicable.
InstallShield lets you specify whether you want a shortcut to be pinned by default to the Start screen on Windows 8 target systems. If you specify that you want the pinning to be disabled, the installation sets a Windows Shell property that was introduced in Windows 8. You may want to disable pinning for shortcuts that are for tools and secondary products that are part of your installation.
Earlier versions of Windows ignore this shortcut property.
To specify whether the shortcut should be pinned by default to the Windows 8 Start screen:
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In the View List under System Configuration, click Shortcuts. |
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In the Shortcuts explorer, select the shortcut that you want to configure. The shortcut’s settings are displayed in the right pane. |
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In the Pin to Windows 8 Start Screen setting, specify the appropriate option: |
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Yes—When the shortcut is installed on Windows 8 systems, it is pinned to the Start screen. End users can optionally unpin the shortcut. This is the default option. |
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No—When the shortcut is installed on Windows 8 systems, it is not pinned to the Start screen. It is available in the Apps list that contains shortcuts to all of the applications on the system. |
Note that Windows 8 maintains information about shortcut pinning to the Start screen after a shortcut is removed by uninstalling the application. Therefore, this setting has no effect on the target system if the shortcut has already been installed on it. Thus, when you are testing this functionality, ensure that you test on a clean machine—one on which this shortcut and its target have never been installed.
For Windows Installer–based projects (Basic MSI, DIM, InstallScript MSI, Merge Module, MSI Database, MSM Database, Transform), some end users have reported run-time warnings or errors with a message such as the following one when Windows Installer is installing a shortcut that configures Shell properties:
Property [1] for shortcut ’[2].lnk’ could not be set.
In the aforementioned message, [1] is the name of the Shell property that Windows Installer is attempting to set, and [2].lnk is the name of the shortcut file. In such cases, it appears that the .lnk file could be locked by a different process.
InstallScript Language Support
The following InstallScript functions enable you to prevent the pinning of a shortcut to the Start screen:
See Also
Shortcuts View
Setting Shell Properties for a Shortcut