So you’ve created a shortcut to your application in the user’s program menu, you run the installer and you realize that the shortcut icon is an ugly generic icon, not the gloriously beautiful icon you’ve embedded in your application as you might have reasonably expected.

To fix this goto the shortcut’s properties -> Icon then select Browse…. In the Icon dialog select Browse… again then in the file selection dialog change the filter “Files of type” to be Executable Files (*.exe). Then double click on “Application Folder” then select “Primary output from …”. Then you can pick the embedded icon.

Wasn’t that easier than Visual Studio picking the icon by default?