Pin Eclipse Helios to Windows 7 Taskbar

Eclipse 3.6 “Helios” has Windows 7 taskbar jump lists and can be pinned to the task bar like  a native app but they don’t work out-of-the-box. The jump lists items generate a bonk error dialog complaining that Java cannot be found and the pin this program to taskbar option is missing.

In order for the Windows 7 taskbar features of Eclipse 3.6 to work, eclipse needs to know where Java is installed. That means editing eclipse.ini  to add a ”-vm” argument followed by the path to your Java runtime. Eclipse.ini is located in the same directory as eclipse.exe and the “–vm” argument has to be the very first line in eclipse.ini or Eclipse will complain a big error dialog that says the Java VM could not be found and refuse to start.

After adding the path to your Java runtime environment to eclipse.ini, start Eclipse but wait until after Eclipse has finished loading your workspace before attempting to pin it to the taskbar. Once the workspace has been loaded, you can pin the Eclipse icon to the Windows 7 taskbar and it will work like any other app. If you don’t wait until after the Workspace is running, you’ll end up getting a second eclipse icon every time you start Eclipse just like with Eclipse 3.5 and Netbeans 6.8.

This solution is working for me Eclipse 3.6.0 for Windows 64 bit running on Sun (Oracle) Java 1.6.0_20 64-bit on Windows 7 x64 Enterprise.

Via bugs.eclipse.org: bug 314805.