Forum Discussion
Priyanka_Aggarwal
Microsoft
MicrosoftWay to package a shortcut with MSIX
Hi,
Is there any way to package a shortcut? I come from App-V 5 and to package Java as an example, I would install java and then pop an IE shortcut on the desktop which would reference the jav...
The shortcut trick from APP-V to link Java with IE doesn't currently work with MSIX. Maybe in the future it will be possible when linking for MSIX packages becomes available.
For the moment, as far as i know, msix linking is in the backlog.
alexmarin89 There are two distinct issues.
1) Shortcut to a file (other than an exe). This issue may be overcome using PsfLauncher of the Package Support Framework.
2) Running an exe that is not part of the package inside the package. These executables generally launch outside of the container. I will be looking into this via the PSF soon as it looks like we might be control this using a technique seen with recent changes for scripting. We don't really want to use scripting so additional PSF changes might be needed. Even with this, it might not work for iexplorer because I'm guessing the processes for the tabs will also pop out of the bubble.
For now I'd consider plugins to IE a bad choice for MSIX, but stay tuned!
- Tim Mangan , on point 2 of calling an exe especially iexplore.exe for custom shortcut do we have any solution available now using PSF ?
On older OSs, having PsfLauncher start iexplore.exe outside of the package would run outside of the container and I assume that isn't what you want. I'm not sure yet with the new changes in 20.04 if the behavior changes but guess that it now runs inside the container.
It might be possible to force it inside the container by copying the iexplore.exe file into the package and having PsfLauncher run that copy (most of IE is in the dlls so the exe is quite small). I mention this as an interesting thing to test only. It might be considered a license violation if you were to use the resulting package on a different OS version -- Microsoft used to be quite unhappy with folks doing things like this to get older versions of IE to run on newer OSs -- but as long as it is the same iexplore.exe version it is possible that licensing might not be an issue. In any case, I can't tell you what is legal since I'm not Microsoft.
