VS2010 Setup Project Upgrade and Shortcuts

Question

I have a VS2010 Setup project for a C# Winforms solution. Deployment of updates using incremental assembly versions and incremental setup version works great.

The problem lies within the msi launch (from within the app), overwriting shortcuts, which then breaks any user created shortcuts (like pin to taskbar).

I've changed the shortcuts to Non-Advertised but any user created shortcuts still break with the following message:

Advertised shortcut's prompt with an "Incorrect Parameter" error after the update.

Even installing with the following arguments don't resolve the issue:

msiexec /i Updates\\Installer.msi /qn /L install.log REINSTALLMODE=amus DISABLEADVTSHORTCUTS=1

Answer 1

Usually new product versions automatically detect and use the old installation path during an upgrade. This way any custom shortcuts or other elements which use the installation path will still work.

Visual Studio doesn't offer this functionality for MSI packages, but you can try implementing it yourself. A common approach is using a search (in Launch Conditions Editor) to find the original install path and save it in your main folder property (TARGETDIR). Other setup tools do this by default.

If each product version uses an unique installation path, you can't do anything to fix custom shortcuts created by the user.