Automatic Shortcut generation for local installed applications in a Citrix XenDesktop / XenApp 7.x environment

I think you all know that Citrix is still not able to detect if an application is installed locally when you publish a Desktop under XenApp / XenDesktop 7.x (in XenApp 6.5 and before that was working really good…). Instead you have to create a Shorcut-Template-Folder containing Shortcuts for all local applications and a Receiver Registry-Key. Furthermore you need to add KEYWORDS:prefer=SHORTCUTNAME to each application . Now Receiver checks if a Shortcut with the specified name exists. If it exists this Shortcut is copied to the Startmenu instead of creating one which starts another ICA-Session. The downside of this that this way it’s not detected that a published application was started – but that’s another story.

As announced during DCUGTecCon in Kassel I have created a script that creates the required Shortcuts. The script checks for all applications with the KEYWORDs:prefer= setting, exports the Application Icon and creates the Shortcuts in a configured folder. The following Script from Andreas Nick is required. You can use Andreas Script to generate any Shortcut with PowerShell. You must save the script in the same folder like my script and name it create-shortcut.ps1. Beside that you have to exclude the following line:

[ValidateSet("AllUsersDesktop", "AllUsersStartMenu", "AllUsersPrograms", "AllUsersStartup", "Desktop", "Favorites", "SendTo", "StartMenu", "Startup")]

The script must be executed on a Delivery Controller. If you only want to create the Shorcut for a specific Application you can use the paramter –ApplicationName “APPLICATIONNAME”.

You can download the script here.

A little bit of background informations about the script idea:
During the preparation for the DCUGTecCon I had some discussions with Andreas. He told me about his script to generate Shortcuts with PowerShell. At the same time, I had to create some shortcuts for some new published applications which are also locally available on a published desktop. Thus I had the idea to automate this with Andreas Script. A few days later the following script was born. I have already done some optimizations.