Tuesday, June 28, 2016

Run Visual Studio as Administrator by default

If you work with Visual Studio and your local IIS instance, you may soon discover that you are unable to load any projects in your solution that are bound to your local IIS instance!

This is because Visual Studio is set to default to using IIS Express which requires lower privileges than projects bound to your local IIS instance.

In order to resolve this problem, you simply need to right-click on your Visual Studio icon and select "Run as administrator" each time before you launch the application.

However, if you use Visual Studio every day, you can see how performing this operation over and over again can be tedious and annoying.

But if you know this handy tip, you can launch Visual Studio with Administrative privileges by default each time!

For this example, I am using Visual Studio 2015, but this can be equally applied to any older version of Visual Studio such as Visual Studio 2013 as well:


  1. Since this operation cannot be performed from the Metro Windows Start menu in Windows 8.1, I would suggest that you pin your Visual Studio icon to the Taskbar.
  2. Now, right click on the pinned Visual Studio icon to launch the popup context menu.
  3. From the popup context menu, select "Visual Studio 2015" (or the name of any earlier instance of Visual Studio)
  4. Right-click once again on the name of "Visual Studio 2015" to get yet another popup context menu
  5. Now, select "Properties" from that subsequent popup context menu
  6. From the new dialog that displays, make sure the "Shortcut" tab is selected and click on the "Advanced..." button
  7. On that screen, you will see an option to select a checkbox for "Run as administrator"
  8. Select that checkbox and click OK
  9. Click OK one more time to close out of the Shortcut dialog
  10. Now when you launch Visual Studio, it will launch under Administrative privileges by default!





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