Partager via

My Take on Visual Studio 2005 SP1 and Windows Vista

  • Article

Over the last couple of days, many people have asked for my take on the fact that Visual Studio 2005 SP1 requires admin privileges to run on Windows Vista, and pops up a dialog saying so when it starts up.

So, here’s my take, and I don't work for the Developer Division!

VS2005SP1 was developed while Windows Vista was being developed, and because of potential late-breaking regressions in the OS (which can happen), the VS team decided to simply do what most service packs do – fix bugs that stop people doing their jobs. Now that Vista has shipped, the VS team is working on an SP1 that works better as a non-admin on Windows Vista, and this is goodness.

Now to the pop-up that recommends you run as an admin. In my opinion, the VS team was simply being very conservative, because some scenarios simply do not work well as a non-admin. For example registering a COM control, installing or debugging a service, or performing admin tasks against SQL Server and so on all require elevated capability, as they very well should!

I probably spend 75% of my time writing and debugging C++ code, 20% of the time using C# and 5% doing SQL, and I always run as a non-admin. In fact I ran as non-admin for prior versions of Visual Studio on Windows XP! 99% of what I do works perfectly well. For the 1% of the time I need to do some admin task, I run an elevated VS.

In closing, the dialog is a little alarming, just do what I did – uncheck the option to display the dialog box and get on with life :-)

One more thing, the VS team has provided a list of known issues with VS on Windows Vista.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 04, 2007
    :) Good advice.

  • Anonymous
    January 05, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 05, 2007
    Does the popup say to run as an admin or non-admin?  I'm assuming the former but you said "admin" in paragraph 1 and "non-admin" in paragraph 4.

  • Anonymous
    January 05, 2007
    JC, good catch - thanks. I have updated the text.

  • Anonymous
    January 10, 2007
    Mike, I have a different take on this, and I don't work for developer division either. I find this very disturbing. The dialog is quite unequivocal. It says specifically "Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 requires... administrative permissions." This is patently NOT true. Visual Studio 2005 does NOT require administrative permissions. It requires administrative permissions IF you want to use certain features, namely those listed at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa948853.aspx?lcid=1033. Most of those will not affect a normal developer unless you write and debug COM code. The dialog is misleading. It will drive people to run VS as admins, and develop apps that only run as admins. It should say "You can perform the vast majority of standard development tasks as a non-admin, but for certain tasks you need to be an administrator. Click here for more information on tasks that require administrative privileges." That is not at all the message you get from the dialog. The dialog, as currently designed, will serve only to perpetuate the number of people developing as admins. If they tried running as non-admin now, then get told they can't, and switch back to using admin privs,  what are the chances that they will stop when the update comes out? My guess is that the number that will change their habits later is asymptotically approaching zero.

  • Anonymous
    January 10, 2007
    When I have something that seems impossible.. I call it "A windmill" My windmills range from getting

  • Anonymous
    January 11, 2007
    Why would you NOT run VS as an administrator at all times? As a developer, I spend enough time on my own work. I don't need to be spending ONE second switching profiles, typing passwords, or wondering when something fails whether it is a security issue or not. I know many developers, and not a single person I know develops as non-admin. Since VS2005 needs to run as Admin, I'd be willing to bet that 99% of the Visual Studio team does the same thing too. (and yes, I own (and read) Writing Secure Code, and I do keep a low-privilege account to test my apps, so I'm not totally ignorant about security issues)

  • Anonymous
    January 11, 2007
    I recently posted something to SC-L that I thought I would share with my readers. Hey guys, Last month I blogged (http://silverstr.ufies.org/blog/archives/000989.html) about my disappointment with the fact that the new service pack for Visual Studio 2005,

  • Anonymous
    January 11, 2007
    I'm perplexed by a statement made by one of the commentors on a recent Michael Howard blog posting .

  • Anonymous
    January 16, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2007
    Chris, the Visual Studio 2005 SP1 update went commercial on 12/14/2006 if that's what you're talking about.