Pin/Unpin Shortcut to Start Menu Layout on Windows 10 using InstallShield 2016 SP2
Hi Team,
We have a requirement to pin/unpin application shortcut to Start Menu Layout - Tiles on Windows 10. Please find the attached screenshot.
Is there a way we can use InstallShield 2016 SP2 editor to add application shortcuts to the start menu layout - tiles that pre-exist on windows 10 build?
So full disclosure: I haven't done this type of shortcut pinning before. I've only made this work with the taskbar shortcuts, but the process overall should be the same.
First of all, you can't natively do this in InstallShield. Microsoft specifically didn't want to provide an API or other easy way to do this, because if they did, every software vendor would do it and the pinned area would fill up with junk just like your desktop does with desktop shortcuts. Baking this into an installer is hostile to the user. That said *I would seriously reconsider the decision to take this path in your installer*.
So, assuming you have a very good reason for doing so, what you are going to need to do is reverse engineer what happens when a user clicks on a shortcut to pin it. This is going to be a Shell Verb, basically.
Then you need to invoke that shell verb from whatever language, passing the path of the *.lnk file in order to pin it. I found some C# code which does this here:
These shell verbs are in the registry, and it's possible that organizations can disable them--make sure on your test machines that it works manually first.
