Win7 Pinned Apps not working for Visual Studio
While doing a regular cleaning up of things on my computer one day I came across a problem. I did just all the normal stuff, emptying out my download folder, removing unnecessary applications and deleting shortcuts on my desktop. I do this periodically on my machine and at that time I noticed that I had large amount of applications that I was no longer using or in develop for. So I started to unpin and remove them from my list of recent apps. This is where I faced my problem, this is just for Visual Studio. I'm not looking at other programs to see if my solution works.
Notes
If you remove all your apps you will be left with this...
This is when you have unpinned apps and removed even those that are in the recent section of the available apps. You can not remove apps without first unpinning them. Once removed it does not reappear again and is not available to pin specifically. However when you create a new application this will make all apps removed available again! This might obvious for some but I felt it was worth noting as I only figured this by accident and was willing to simply live with it as I use my file explorer more. What I do is create shortcuts in my file explorer for the favorites like so...
This might also not work if you already have the application you want to re-appear opened, so just close it and reopen it, with either behavior you should start to see applications re-appearing. I was using Windows 7 Professional with Visual Studio 11.0 64 bit (2012 version) but I can confirm it will work on Windows 7 Enterprise with Visual Studio 10.0 (2010 version) as well. This should work for other versions that I did not specify with Windows 7 & Visual Studio 10/11.
Notes
If you remove all your apps you will be left with this...
Where Projects just points to my Visual Studio 11.0 projects folder. Also Windows 7 by default does not have the Desktop shortcut included in my favorites (nor Github) too. So back to my solution I have seen two ways that it behaves but either way still fixed my corrected my problem just need to play around a little more. Creating new project in Visual Studio and you will now see that new application in the recent projects section, but what you might not see right away is the removed projects. Simply open up the projects and you will begin to seem them in the recent section like so...