How to set up development without an administrator in Visual Studio 2005 and 2003

Question

We have been given a directive to make sure that during development we run out of admin and poweruser groups to prevent security holes. What steps should be taken to make this possible, but still be able to debug, code, and install when necessary?

We are developing ASP.NET as well as VB.NET applications.

Thanks!

Brooke jackson

Answer 1

I have been developing a web application in a team of 5+ developers using ASP.NET 2.0 using Visual C # 2005 and Visual Web Developer 2005 for 6 months. It was an internal application for our client and was intended for Internet Explorer 6.0. I have always used a non-admin account on my machine and have never encountered any problems. In particular, I did not experience debugging problems. Now I'm moving on to Visual Studio 2008, and I hope that everything will work the same way as now.

I use a laptop for development. At the same time, I navigate and connect to the Internet in different places, and I use my administrator account only when necessary. I truly believe that starting an administrator account for everyday tasks is the single biggest security risk, just because it is so common.

Answer 2

Beware, it seems that there are many problems starting VS as non-admin .

Answer 3

It seems silly to me. Run VS as an administrator / authorized user locally with any minimum rights that you need on the network to publish to users and something else.

Just make sure that the applications you create using VS still work without these additional permissions.

Answer 4

Use Vista and take advantage of or UAC because this UAC allows you to do so. You can grant VS full rights, when necessary, and rights to the application / website.

I am running VS2008 on Vista with UAC enabled. I had only one question worth mentioning.

I sometimes have problems with file permissions when I run VS with elevated privileges and then run it without them. VS will not be able to delete old build files, but if I delete them from Explorer, it will be fine. Again, this only happens when switching between high and low resolutions.