Question

go to any dotnet application shortcut made by dotnet setup and click property, in the screen that’s come up, why find target button is disabled?!

this just happened to the shortcut produced by dotnet Setup, why? and how to enable it?

Answer 1

This is a feature of Windows Installer
and is called "Advertised Shortcut".
This shortcut contains information
about the product it is pointing to.

You can turn this
on/off in your setup, by setting the
DISABLEADVTSHORTCUTS property.

Advertised Shortcut

In the MSI world there are two types
of shortcut – advertised and
non-advertised.

A non-advertised shortcut is a
standard windows shortcut. If you
right-click it you will see the target
field points to the executable that
will be launched. If, for whatever
reason, this executable is missing the
application will simply fail.

An advertised shortcut is a
technology specific to Windows
Installer. If you right-click an
advertised shortcut the target field
will be greyed out. An advertised
shortcut supports advertisement and
repair.

Repair means that if the executable to
which the shortcut is pointing is not
there then windows installer will
repair the application and replace the
missing file. In fact, it will also
check other important files, flagged
as key paths, and if any of those are
missing it will replace them as well.

Advertisement is a process in which
the application appears to be
installed the shortcuts are there but
the application is not actually
installed. The installation, the
copying of files and registry entries,
only takes place when the user first
launches the application. An
advertised install only puts down what
we call the application interfaces. An
application interface is any way to
start the application. This could be a
shortcut, file extension or COM
interface.

EDIT

To add the property, you can use Orca MSI Editor, or take a look at how to Set DISABLEADVTSHORTCUTS property in VS.NET setup project article.

EDIT 2

Some more interesting info over here. You can directly run setup.exe with the parameters – setup.exe DISABLEADVTSHORTCUTS=1 or msiexec.exe <path to msi-file> DISABLEADVTSHORTCUTS=1.

And, if you are using Orca MSI Editor, you can set the property by opening your msi file, and going to the Property page (on the left), and adding a new property by right-clicking "Add Row" menu option. Save the msi, and you are done.