This is one of those cute little code snippets that you have a use for in practically every application. Applications that can do this look cool and intelligent—and it takes just a few simple lines of code. I’m talking about adding an Internet shortcut to the user’s Favorites menu.

How do you do it? Well, the following function encompasses all the logic for you. It accepts a page title and a URL. Then it locates the current Favorites folder (which could vary greatly depending on the machine setup) and creates a URL file in that folder, based on the title you passed. Inside that file, it includes a little required text for an Internet shortcut, alongside your URL. And that’s it—shortcut created!

Here’s the code:

Public Sub CreateShortcut(ByVal Title As String, ByVal URL As String)
    ' Creates a shortcut in the users Favorites folder
    Dim strFavoriteFolder As String
    ' Retrieve the favorite folder
    strFavoriteFolder = System.Environment.GetFolderPath( _
    Environment.SpecialFolder.Favorites)
    ' Create shortcut file, based on Title
    Dim objWriter As System.IO.StreamWriter = _
    System.IO.File.CreateText(strFavoriteFolder & _
"\" & Title & ".url")
    ' Write URL to file
    objWriter.WriteLine("[InternetShortcut]")
    objWriter.WriteLine("URL=" & URL)
    ' Close file
    objWriter.Close()
End Sub

To finish off this snippet, here are a couple of interesting calls to this procedure:

CreateShortcut("Karl Moore.com", "http://www.karlmoore.com/")
CreateShortcut("Send mail to Karl Moore", "mailto:karl@karlmoore.com")