UAC – Configuring Run Levels

 

As promised, here is the second and what I hope to be the most useful part of my series on UAC. A lot of this control is in fact on the development end of the application and good programming techniques actually help eliminate the need for UAC to even prompt for elevation. But, there are, of course, a certain number of operations that will need to be elevated no matter how well they are written. The following should help[ you manage these.

Applications running with an administrator access token will run in elevated mode by default, but often you will want to run an application with a standard user token in elevated mode. One of the most common uses of this would be to run and/or test scripts in a command prompt window.

To do this only once, simply right click on the programs shortcut icon or on the executable directly and select run as administrator.  You will be prompted for consent before continuing. As mentioned, this is a one time deal and windows will not remember this action.

Should you need an application to always run with administrator privileges, Server 2008 also allows users to mark a program to always run as an administrator.  To do this, simply right click on the program, choose properties, select the compatibility tab and under the privilege level section select “Run this program as an administrator.”  You will find that this is extremely useful for legacy applications that need administrative privileges to run and is also a good place to start troubleshooting when trying to figure out why legacy programs aren’t behaving properly in the Windows Server 2008 environment.

 

Anyway, these little tips help those of you just embarking on the Windows 7, Server 2008, and Windows Vista experience.

I believe Paul is planning on writing a blog post on creating UAC application manifests, so stay tuned for that.