Pre-populating an App-V virtual application in the Windows 7 Taskbar

GrayAndYellowGearsI have encountered issues where customers and users of App-V have asked me about the integration of App-V with the Windows 7 Taskbar. Windows 7 Taskbar support has been available since Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 Service Pack 1 (SP1), however there are limits to its integration. In quick summary, the short answer is yes for manual pinning and no for automatic pre-population (via Publishing/DC refresh).

Pinning an App-V application to the Taskbar

Once a virtual application has been published to an Windows 7 (or Windows 2008 R2) desktop, a user can pin the application to the taskbar just like any other normal application. At this point a special shortcut will be created. The location of this pinned shortcut is in:

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\Taskbar

When a user pins an application to the taskbar, the shortcut appears here as well.

What happens if you attempt to pre-populate the Taskbar?

So, what if you wanted to pre-populate the taskbar in an App-V full (server-based) infrastructure via DC refresh? Well, if you were to modify the Shortcut locations for QuickLaunch to reflect this path as shown below:

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Upon a refresh of the Win7 client running App-V 4.6 you will find that App-V does its job and the shortcut does appear in the shell folder.

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Yes, it still does not show up on the taskbar. It turns out this is by design from the Windows 7 shell developers. Windows 7 does not allow pre-population of the taskbar. The reason behind this was the fact that this would be user-controlled and not have various application installers pre-populating this.

This feature not being able to work has nothing to do to an App-V limitation but the decision to purposely restrict any population of the Taskbar outside of the defaults and only allow for manually pinned icons.

Steve Thomas | Senior Support Escalation Engineer

The App-V Team blog: https://blogs.technet.com/appv/
The WSUS Support Team blog: https://blogs.technet.com/sus/
The SCMDM Support Team blog: https://blogs.technet.com/mdm/
The ConfigMgr Support Team blog: https://blogs.technet.com/configurationmgr/
The OpsMgr Support Team blog: https://blogs.technet.com/operationsmgr/
The SCVMM Team blog: https://blogs.technet.com/scvmm/
The MED-V Team blog: https://blogs.technet.com/medv/
The DPM Team blog: https://blogs.technet.com/dpm/
The OOB Support Team blog: https://blogs.technet.com/oob/
The Opalis Team blog: https://blogs.technet.com/opalis

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