I finally had time to track this one down.
When using the MSIX Packaging Tool, there is an option to specify an installation directory. It seems that it is necessary to specify a directory that already exists before you get into the monitoring mode. I have found that if I specify a directory that doesn't exist (using 2019.701), the following occurs:
- The app is captured as VFS anyway
- No shortcut is automatically detected (in my test the shortcut was placed in Common Appdata\vendorname folder. The lnk file was captured, but no shortcut detected.
- If you manually ask to add a shortcut, the tool noticies the program exe and offers to make a shortcut for that. If you do, it places that shortcut on the desktop (however that doesn't matter as it's just looking for a shortcut and isn't going to place it on the desktop when the package is deployed).
- The resulting package has only the store logo in the assets folder.
- The resulting package has no icon for the AppInstaller, so you see an empty blue square.
- After the package is installed, there will be no shortcut anywhere.
While there is question in my mind as to if VFS should be the default, this behavior is problematic. The packaging tool should either scold me when I type in a non-existent directory or (better) just make it for me before entering monitoring mode.
