.NET Programming Tasks Requiring Local Administrator Rights

Question

In our company, all developers have local administrator rights. But now one of my younger employees must justify the need to respect the rights of local administrators.

So he asked me what we are doing, which requires local administrator rights.

The problem is that I have rights, so I don’t know what I could not do without them.

We develop things like ASP.NET, WCF services, WPF applications, SSIS packages, SQL Server common development. We also use legacy Delphi Client Server products (Delphi 5 and Delphi 6).

Does anyone know specific tasks that would not be possible without local administrator rights?

Answer 1

You cannot run / debug using full-fledged IIS without local administrator rights.

You cannot copy files to protected directories. Maybe this can be important.

Plus hundreds of other PITA minor things that we, as developers, do every day.

Answer 2

Hundreds of small obstacles, each of which is resolved by calling those who manage the network, but each of which adds delays and takes you out of the "zone". Thinking out loud:

• installing random search tools if they solve a problem (our work is creative, not a script)
• regularly changing "hosts" to assign individual nodes per cluster
• developing something that acts as a network server, or often as a client
• installation of special certificates
• view event logs

You could say: do it in a virtual machine, but the IDE really needs the same power as you can give then, and you still need to be an administrator on vm

Answer 3

Here is the official list of user and Visual Studio permissions from MSDN:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj662724.aspx

Answer 4

Obscure, but for some reason you cannot run WatiN tests through MSTest if you are not working as an administrator.

But of course, running WatiN through NUnit works just fine, which is yet another testament to the horror of MSTest.

Answer 5

In ASP.NET, you cannot create virtual directories in IIS (by default, VS will not load Web or WCF projects). You could leave with Cassini / Web Development Server.

In WCF, you cannot netsh open ports and URIs for listening.

In SQL, you will not have a default LocalAdmin = System Admin mapping, so additional permissions will be required to run the SQL profiler or create new databases.

Answer 6

You cannot run some performance / profiling tools, such as the concurrency visualizer, unless VS is running as an Administrator.