Debug a program that needs administrator rights under Windows 7

Question

I'm running Visual Studio 2008 on Windows 7 64-bit. I'm logged in as administrator, and I'm running it as administrator, but the program I'm working on fails with access denied when I call a restricted API. If run the program from Explorer with "Run as Administrator" it works.

I was under the belief that Visual Studio 2008 debugs programs with whatever rights Visual Studio 2008 itself is running with. As it stands I can't debug my application due to this, and I'm at a loss as to what's going on.

Solution 1

I found the answer. It turns out that it is, in fact, a manifest issue: by default if you have a manifest you need to set the appropriate administrator privilege.

The default is asInvoker, but that doesn't work if you need elevated privileges; you instead have to set it to requireAdministrator in the manifest properties.

Solution 2

This works for Visual Studio 2012.

• Create a manifest file: right click on the project and select "Add New Item", select "Application Manifest File". This will add a file named app.manifest to the project.
• Edit manifest file: set attribute level for tag requestedExecutionLevel to requireAdministrator.

Now your program will always require admin privileges, wherever it is executed. If launched by Visual Studio debugger, it will prompt you for restarting Visual Studio as administrator, if needed.

Solution 3

It's best to run Visual Studio 2008 as administrator. Moreover, it's good to change your application's manifest settings to require administrator privileges. You will be prompted by the system to elevate to system administrator each time you start your application, and when running under Visual Studio 2008 the IDE will offer you the elevation before start of debugging.

To change the setting, open project properties and go to Configuration Properties → Linker → Manifest file → UAC Execution Level.

Solution 4

Run Visual Studio 2008 as administrator.

Solution 5

I had a case where I put in the

    <requestedExecutionLevel level="requireAdministrator" uiAccess="false" />

settings (described by another answer at this post)........and did not work.

I found another tip (seen below)...and unchecking that option allowed my code to work.

Try going into the project properties, and under the "debug" tab, uncheck "enable the Visual Studio hosting process" and see if that fixes your problem.

(from https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/b5c4da93-5d64-442e-af28-df6d10765538/debug-as-administrator?forum=vbgeneral)

So I needed the app.manifest settings AND the "uncheck".

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