Warning dialog appears when launching Visual Studio 2005 SP1 on Windows Vista

As I'm sure many of you have noticed, Visual Studio 2005 SP1 was made available via Microsoft Update as a recommended update starting sometime last week.  I have opted my Windows Vista systems in to receive updates from Microsoft Update (by clicking the link at the bottom of the Windows Update control panel in Windows Vista and then accepting the license agreement on the Microsoft Update web site), and my Windows Vista systems are configured to automatically download and install critical and recommended updates.  As a result, I came into work on Monday and noticed that my systems now had Visual Studio 2005 SP1 installed.

When I launched the IDE for Visual Studio 2005 and/or the Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions on my Windows Vista system for the first time after installing VS 2005 SP1, I noticed a new dialog that started appearing.  It contains the following text:

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 requires the 2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista and to be run with administrative permissions.

This dialog looks like the following:

The link in this dialog points to the Visual Studio on Windows Vista topic on MSDN.  Unfortunately, as of the time I am writing this blog post, the 2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista is only available in beta form (via this download link).

If you would like to prevent this dialog from appearing each time you launch Visual Studio, you can uncheck the Always show this message check box and click Continue.  Alternatively, you can set one of the following registry values if you need to automate the suppression of this dialog:

• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0
  ShowWindowsAdminDlg = 0 (REG_DWORD)
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VBExpress\8.0
  ShowWindowsAdminDlg = 0 (REG_DWORD)
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VCExpress\8.0
  ShowWindowsAdminDlg = 0 (REG_DWORD)
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VCSExpress\8.0
  ShowWindowsAdminDlg = 0 (REG_DWORD)
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VJSExpress\8.0
  ShowWindowsAdminDlg = 0 (REG_DWORD)
• HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VWDExpress\8.0
  ShowWindowsAdminDlg = 0 (REG_DWORD)

Note that there is a different registry value that must be set for each of the Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions, but only a single that must be set for all standard and higher editions of Visual Studio 2005.

<update date="3/16/2010"> Fixed broken image link. </update>

Comments

• Anonymous
  February 07, 2007
  VS is complicated, and I couldn’t possible ever know everything there is about it.  But I'm a bit confused by that dialog's message, and I'm still trying to master Vista’s UAC & elevation.  Does it require admin rights?  Or does it need admin rights + elevation?  Couldn't they have added requireAdministrator to the devenv.exe.manifest, and removed the administrative requirement from that dialog? <requestedExecutionLevel level="requireAdministrator" uiAccess="true"/>

• Anonymous
  February 08, 2007
  Hi Mgama - Not all parts of Visual Studio require elevation, but we have found several things that do.  Instead of forcing elevation in all cases, we decided to provide a general advisory dialog that the user can choose to bypass if they are going to be performing actions that don't require administrative privileges. You are correct that the information you mention could have been added to devenv.exe.manifest to force it to prompt for elevation when the user tried to run Visual Studio on Windows Vista.

• Anonymous
  March 06, 2007
  I noticed this afternoon that the final release of the Visual Studio 2005 SP1 update for Windows Vista

• Anonymous
  August 19, 2013
  i just right click on the shortcut, went to compatibility tab and chose compatible for windows xp(service pack 3) ...(but i dont know the impact yet)   now it stopped asking me the dialog (administrator permissions are recommended for running visual studio 2005 sp1) ... i got rid of the irritating dialog.. hope this helps for others but if any associated issues i dont know ,,, if anybody knows the same please help me.