what features or tasks in Visual Studio require administrative permissions?

There is a debate going in our department to remove local admin rights to the development workstations we use. 开发者_如何转开发I believe this will cause problems for the developers when trying to debug or run other tasks in Visual Studio but I can't put my finger on any one thing to support my argument.

What features or tasks require Visual Studio to run under a local admin account?

What do you think?

Visual Studio is designed to run in an environment without the need for administrative permissions. In general it does a good job at this and really only requires admin permissions when forced by the underlying operating system. Here are the few places I'm aware of that require this out of the box

• Registering a COM component as a part of an F5
• Debugging certain web project deployments on an IIS server
• Attaching the debugger to processes running as Admin or other users

I'm sure there are a few more but these are the ones that come to mind. Note many of these can be worked around by making the scenario more limited user aware.

Development (= creation & debugging) of:

• Windows services
• A website in IIS (you can use the Development server, but its not the same)
• Installation (MSI) packages
• (Hardware-) drivers
• Other system hooks

As an example of the project types mentioned in other answers, Visual Studio Tools for Windows Azure requires running VS in admin mode because the Windows Azure SDK's local dev fabric (cloud simulation environment for local debugging) runs in admin mode. This falls under the category of debugging processes that are running in admin mode.

If you aren't an administrator, you will need to be added to the Debugger Users group.

See also here.