Fix Visual Studio 2013 Start Menu shortcuts

Click here to see this bug on Connect.

Visual Studio 2013 configures Start Menu shortcuts differently to earlier versions. Specifically, it adds a shortcut to ‘Visual Studio Tools’ (%PROGRAMFILES(X86)%\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\Tools\Shortcuts), where Visual Studio 2012 added a directory called ‘Visual Studio Tools’ and added copies of the shortcuts. This is all a bit confusing, but the end result is that searching in the Start Menu/Screen won’t bring up results for useful things like the Developer Command Prompt or Spy++.

This annoyed me sufficiently that I wrote a PowerShell script (run it as administrator) to restore the shortcut directory:

The Visual Studio Shortcuts directory doesn’t contain shortcuts to Spy++ (and a number of other programs). Here’s another script to restore shortcuts to Spy++:


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2 responses to “Fix Visual Studio 2013 Start Menu shortcuts”

  1. Jonathan Kay Avatar

    Thanks for this, I do wonder if this was by design or a bug no one caught.

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