Creating ShortCuts On Desktop?

[ahostbr]

Does anyone know how id go about doing this? Ive searched but didnt find anything. thx in advance

[Hack]

What installer are you using?

Most have that feature built into them.

[ahostbr]

Its a portable app so id like to do it on form load or in some settiings...
o and vb2008

[dilettante]

"Portable" usually means the application travels via removable media. Thus a desktop shortcut is pointless.

There are many "portable app environment toolkits" though that offer a launcher applet, often taking the form of a mini-Start menu that can be popped up from a notification area (tray) icon. U3 is one example. These are generally set up to autorun on media insertion where possible.

If you just want to go ahead and make a desktop shortcut there isn't much to it. In VB6 I suppose I might use the Shell Automation Objects or even the Script Host Object Model to do this. There is probably some .Net BCL wrapper for shell32.dll that does the same thing.

But just as with a floppy disk the user might insert the disk into A: sometimes and B: other times, USB drives offer no guarantee regarding the "drive letter" assignment either from insertion to insertion. Windows will try to reassign the same letter to a given device on subsequent insertions... which is even a problem when Windows gave the device G: the first time, but later you have another G: (mapped share, etc.) when you plug that USB device in a second time.

Portable app toolkits tend to have addressed most of these issues for you.

[ahostbr]

i meant portable as in no install needed. And I wanted to open the settigns dialog on load and let the users pick where to put shortcuts. thank you for your suggestions ill be google'n 4 the next few hrs

[si_the_geek]

i meant portable as in no install needed.

In that case VB isn't a great idea (especially VB2008), as some things need to be installed in order for your program to run - in this case whichever .Net framework you developed against.

In some cases users will have it already (from another program, or via an optional Windows Update, etc), but in many cases they wont.