ClickOnce start menu icon

Question

How do I set the icon for my start menu shortcut, when I deploy and install my application with ClickOnce?

Platform: Visual Studio 2010 Professional Beta 1

Solution 1

Double-click on the properties for your main project.

Click on the Application tab. (I'm assuming C# here. If you're doing VB, post back if it's different and I'll see if it's the same.)

In the middle of the page, there is an option for "icon and manifest".
Browse to find the icon you want to use and select it.
It needs to be in the top folder of your project; I think it will put it there when you select it.
The icon will be deployed with your project, and will be used in the Start Menu. (You can doublecheck the Application Files dialog -- it should be in there marked include(auto)).

You can set the icon on the forms to point to the same icon, and show it on all your forms too.

Solution 2

The question that led me to this thread was the following: How do I set the icon for my start menu shortcut when I deploy and install my application with ClickOnce? This is Rene's question as well.

I did try the solution where one goes to the Application tab and in the middle of the page use the option for "icon and manifest". I made sure that the icon was in the various resource files. The icon appeared on my window form, but this failed to solve the problem: The start icon remained the default icon and did not change to my application's icon.

It failed because there was another issue involved. The icon.ico file I had built for the form was 250x250 and 96px resolution. I rebuilt the application icon, which was located in the root folder, to 16x16 and 72px resolution. After doing this the Start Menu icon in Windows changed top my application's icon.

Solution 3

If you have previously published the app with the default icon, you have to uninstall the app and reinstall to get the new icon to display correctly.

Comments

[René Stalder]

Didn't work that way. Already tried. Maybe it's a bug in Visual Studio 2010 beta

[RobinDotNet]

That's very odd. I deployed my application and haven't had any problems with it. Is the ico file included in the deployment? Is it in Application Files, marked Include?

[jpierson]

RobinDotNet's advice about the icon, specifically that "It needs to be in the top folder of your project" is crucial. I just got done wasting a few hours hunting down an issue where my icon was being placed in Application Files folder under Images\myicon.deploy which was causing an error when downloading this resource.

[Fatima]

I had this problem too. When I installed my app on the client the icon was the windows default. This answer did well for me.

[The Muffin Man]

It doesn't look like this option is available for VSTO projects in VS2015.

[Hultan]

In my case I had to completely uninstall the application and reinstall it again before I could get the icon in the start menu.

[Hypenate]

In 2021, this is not the case anymore.

[Will Buffington]

Just reproduced this behavior using Visual Studio 2019 and Windows 10. I had to uninstall the ClickOnce app and reinstall it to get the icon to show up in the start menu.