Programmatically PIN Shortcut onto Taskbar on Win7

Background

During my work, I got one requirement of pinning a specific shortcut file (*.lnk) onto the Windows 7 Taskbar, after investigating I found programmatically achieving this is “not permitted”, refer to the MSDN article here.

A small set of applications are pinned by default for new installations. Other than these, only the user can pin further applications; programmatic pinning by an application is not permitted.

However, the exception comes from Windows Script Hosting, a snippet of VBscript can achieve my requirement, I read several articles (refer to the end of this post) and wrote two VBS scripts shown below:

Pin to Taskbar

Option Explicit

'Const CSIDL_COMMON_PROGRAMS = &H17
Dim ShellApp, FSO, Desktop
Set ShellApp = CreateObject("Shell.Application")
Set FSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")

'Set StartMenuFolder = ShellApp.NameSpace(CSIDL_COMMON_PROGRAMS)
Set Desktop =  ShellApp.NameSpace("C:\Users\Wayne\Desktop")

Dim LnkFile
LnkFile = Desktop.Self.Path&"\ScheduleNotifier.lnk"

If(FSO.FileExists(LnkFile)) Then
    Dim tmp, verb
    'For Each verb in Desktop.ParseName("ScheduleNotifier.lnk").Verbs
        'tmp = tmp&verb&chr(13)
    'Next
    'MsgBox(tmp)

    Dim desktopImtes, item
    Set desktopImtes = Desktop.Items()

    For Each item in desktopImtes
        If (item.Name = "ScheduleNotifier") Then
            'MsgBox(item.Name)
            For Each verb in item.Verbs
                If (verb.Name = "Pin to Tas&kbar") _
		Then 'If (verb.Name = "锁定到任务栏(&K)")
                    verb.DoIt
                End If
            Next
        End If
    Next

End If

Set FSO = Nothing
Set ShellApp = Nothing

Unpin from Taskbar

Option Explicit
'Const CSIDL_COMMON_PROGRAMS = &H17
Dim ShellApp, FSO, Desktop
Set ShellApp = CreateObject("Shell.Application")
Set FSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")

'Set StartMenuFolder = ShellApp.NameSpace(CSIDL_COMMON_PROGRAMS)
Set Desktop =  ShellApp.NameSpace("C:\Users\Wayne\Desktop")

Dim LnkFile
LnkFile = Desktop.Self.Path&"\ScheduleNotifier.lnk"

If(FSO.FileExists(LnkFile)) Then
    Dim tmp, verb
    'For Each verb in Desktop.ParseName("ScheduleNotifier.lnk").Verbs
        'tmp = tmp&verb&chr(13)
    'Next
    'MsgBox(tmp)

    Dim desktopImtes, item
    Set desktopImtes = Desktop.Items()

    For Each item in desktopImtes
        If (item.Name = "ScheduleNotifier") Then
            'MsgBox(item.Name)
            For Each verb in item.Verbs
                If (verb.Name = "Unpin from Tas&kbar") _
		Then 'If (verb.Name = "从任务栏脱离(&K)")
                    verb.DoIt
                End If
            Next
        End If
    Next

End If

Set FSO = Nothing
Set ShellApp = Nothing

Although two snippets of VBS code are simple and straight-forward, they have one serious limitation. It only supports one specified language, attention of this line of code:

If (verb.Name = "Pin to Tas&kbar") Then 'If (verb.Name = "锁定到任务栏(&K)")

On Chinese locale, I have to replace “Pin to Tas&kbar” with “锁定到任务栏(&K)”, so in order to support more languages, I need to know each exact {Pin sentence} to do the pinning, you know, Google translation won’t always work in this case:), so I definitely don’t want to do that…

You probably ask WHY??? Because FolderItemVerb object only has one property: Name, and Name is definitely “language sensitive“, MSDN does mention there are two more properties “Application” and “Parent” however they are “Not implemented”.

Several Tips

• For a specific Windows user, all shortcuts pinned onto taskbar store the shortcuts files under
  %AppData%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar
• OEM manufacturers could “pre-pin” some shortcut onto the Taskbar before shipping the PC/laptops to the consumers, simply run batch command below during the DASH (see Desktop and mobile Architecture for System Hardware) process:
  Rem Pining OEM Welcome Center app on task barReg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\TBDEn /v SBOEM0 /t REG_EXPAND_SZ /d “SomeFile.lnk” /f

References

• Pin Items to the Start Menu or Windows 7 Taskbar via Script http://blogs.technet.com/b/deploymentguys/archive/2009/04/08/pin-items-to-the-start-menu-or-windows-7-taskbar-via-script.aspx
• Pin and Un-pin items to/from the Windows 7 taskbar http://blog.ananthonline.net/?p=37