I’m having an issue with an creating application shortcut on the desktop from a Visual Studio 2010 deployment project. The shortcut is created just fine, but when I go to drag and drop an application-specific file onto the shortcut, it doesn’t work (the cursor turns into the red circle with a slash through it). On the other hand, if I go to the application directory and do this on the executable itself it works fine (it opens the file properly). The interesting part is if I manually create a shortcut to the executable after install, it also works to drag and drop files onto that.
Something that might be useful that I discovered when I was trying to fix this is that if I open up the properties dialog of both the shortcuts (the deployment project created one and the one I made manually), the manually created one has as its target the full path of the executable, whereas the other one just has the name of the executable (although its start in directory is correct). They both run the application when I double-click on them and they both have the correct icon displayed.
How do I get the deployment project created shortcut to allow drag and drop of executable files onto it to open them?
I had the same issue.
First i went here, which answers your question:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/vssetup/thread/b57f1d84-9b0c-4c29-b140-0555f92ffed8
But apparently support for orca.exe and WiRunSQL.vbs seems to have disappeared because I couldn’t find it on msdn anywhere.
Then i found http://www.instedit.com which seems to have done the trick. I liked the automated answer of the vbs script, but oh well.