Question

To make my application to start on Windows sturup I decided to put a shortcut to Startup folder.

I tried to use:

File.Move(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory + "ApplicationName.exe", Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.Startup) + "ApplicationName.lnk");

It works, but it moves my shortcut not to the folder I need.

Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.Startup)

works well, it returns:

C:\Users\Germanov\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

But my shortcut appears in

C:\Users\Germanov\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs

Just 1 folder “behind”.

File.Delete(Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.Startup) + "ApplicationName.lnk");

also works “strange”. It actually deletes this file, but again not in “Startup” folder.

If I try to manually add “\Startup” to the path like this:

Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.Startup) + @"Startup\ApplicationName.lnk"

I get a System.IO.Excseption.

I can’t type this path manually, I neen my application to work at diferent PCs with different versions of Windows. I also can’t use Registry to make my application start with windows startup.

I use Windows 7, Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4.0, this is a WPF project.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Did you tried Environment.SpecialFolder.CommonStartup instead of Startup, I don’t know why startup is not working for your requirement. Most of installer package do this for you; why do you want to do this for your self? Any reason not for using Registry?

I tried this code on my machine

var startup = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.CommonStartup);
string file = Path.Combine(startup, "MyApp.lnk");
using (StreamWriter sw = new StreamWriter(file))
{
sw.WriteLine("Test");
}

And its coming on my startup