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