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This entry has been published on 2016-10-24 and may be out of date.

Last Updated on 2016-10-24.

[:en]Scenario

You have a custom application which you want to handle certain URI links, like “tel”, “mailto”, “xmpp” etc.

In Windows 7 and below, this could be done with a single registry key, but starting from Win8 this became a bit more complex.

The following tutorial is compatible with Windows 7, 8 and 10 (and hopefully above).

Solution

If you use Visual Studio and want to distribute the URL association via your Setup file, first install the Windows Installer Projects extension.

It contains an area for File extensions, but do not place your URL extension data here! E.g. “tel” would be converted to a file extension “.tel”, so we have to do this manually in the registry keys area.

Have a look at the screenshots below, there are several keys which have to be created, some equal keys several times.

tel1  tel2

tel3  tel4

tel5

The following is a GPO exported txt file where I created an XMPP URI association:

xmpp

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