Automatically Start Visual Studio in Administrator Mode

Almost every Visual Studio solution work on these days has one or more ASP .NET MVC / ASP .NET Web API projects, most of which require a full IIS, often hosted locally on my own pc.

To get this to work, I have to run my Visual Studio in administrator mode.  By default, even though you might be admin on your own machine, Visual Studio doesn’t start in administrator mode – which makes for a lot of cursing at my screen when I accidentally open such a solution for the n-th time in normal mode.

But there’s a way to make Visual Studio auto-start in administrator mode – thought I’d share it on my blog after I tweeted it yesterday, b/c surely I won’t be the only one who experiences this annoyance 🙂

It’s pretty simple actually: you have to associate some compatibility mode changes with devenv.exe.  Here’s how:

• First, locate devenv.exe (if you’re using VS2013 on Windows 8.1, you’ll find it in folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE)
• Right-click it, and choose Troubleshoot compatibility
• Next, click on Troubleshoot program, and check This program requires additional permissions.  Click Next
• The compatibility wizard will ask to test the program.  Do this, and afterwards, click Next
• Save the settings, and close the compatibility wizard.

You might want to apply the same procedure to vslauncher.exe as well (vslauncher.exe is located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\MSEnv).

And there we go, that’s all there is to it.

Happy coding! 🙂