Advertising Shortcuts

We have previously touched upon advertising and how it uses Windows Installer to check key-paths and force repairs if issues are found. As the use of shortcuts is the main method for running applications on workstations, a lot of emphasis is placed on ensuring they are advertised so healing may occur.

For shortcut advertising to occur, each executable must be in a component of its own and set as a keypath for that component.

Note: The target of an advertised shortcut is a feature – not a particular file.

Network Resources - Shortcuts

A possible trick exists for creating advertised shortcuts to server based executables.

You can’t create an advertised shortcut to a file that is not installed as part of the MSI and advertised files may only be compiled files.

The way to get around this is to create a .LNK file. The freeware command line utility shortcut.exe will do this nicely. Your LNK file can point to a particular location on a server.

Because a .LNK file is compiled, you can create an advertised shortcut to it as well!

Save yourself a lot a stuffing around with correcting ICE errors by dumping the shortcut .LNK file into the “All Users\Application Data” section of the file system and create an advertised shortcut to there.

Because Windows Installer tries to enforce a separation between System and Profile files, you can get caught up with ICE errors when the lnk file is dumped in a Program Files subdirectory.