CODEWITHSUNDEEP
visual-studio-2012
Uchitha
Uchitha

Reputation: 1038

Developing in VS2012 with no admin rights

I'm doing some research on limitations of developing with VS2012/Windows7 with no local admin rights.

I found this link re: VS2003 and lack of admin rights. However can not find any information regarding VS2012. Can someone please help me?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 2259

Answers (1)

Cody Gray
Cody Gray

Reputation: 244682

You do not need administrative rights to develop applications using Visual Studio on Windows. I do it all the time. Like any good Windows user, my primary account does not run with administrative privileges.

There are only a couple of cases that I can think of where you might need additional privileges.

First is if you're doing something like developing Windows services or shell extensions (rather than, say, desktop or Web applications). Then you'll need to have the ability to install, remove, start, and stop services; install shell extensions; relaunch Explorer; etc.. Or better yet, just do all of your testing inside of a virtual machine, on which you can grant full administrative privileges with little or no security concerns.

Second is if you need to debug a process that your user account does not have access to. In practice, this would mean attaching the debugger to a running process that is not your own. Normally you won't need to do this, as the only processes you'll be attaching a debugger to are the ones that you're writing, and you'll own those processes. But if you do need to debug the operating system or processes running in the context of another user, you will need some degree of administrative privileges. Fortunately, you can grant the debug privilege separately from the whole suite of administrative privileges. Somewhat less fortunately, this still gives away the farm—a skilled hacker with debug privileges effectively has the run of the system. One hopes you would be able to trust your programmers at least a little bit, though! The worst case is they trash their own machine and it has to be reloaded.

Upvotes: 5

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