Working with Web Projects in Visual Studio as a Non-Administrative User

Article
12/04/2014

As a security best practice, it is recommended that you log on to your computer as a user that does not have administrative privileges. Running as a non-administrative user can help limit the effect of a security breach, because a process that runs in your non-administrative user context does not have unlimited access to resources.

You can run Visual Studio when you are logged on as a non-administrative user, but certain features are not available. In general, these are not limitations in Visual Studio itself but in other processes that Visual Studio interacts with. To avoid these issues, you can run Visual Studio as an administrator by right-clicking the application icon and selecting Run as Administrator from the context menu.

The following table lists features in Visual Studio that are not available if you are logged on as a non-administrative user.

Feature	Notes
Creating a new local or remote IIS Web site project	You cannot make changes to the Internet Information Services (IIS) metabase (for example, creating new entries) because it requires administrative privileges. This affects your ability to configure some settings in the Web.config file.
Opening a local or remote IIS Web site project	You cannot make changes to the IIS metabase (for example, creating new entries) because it requires administrative privileges. This affects your ability to configure some settings in the Web.config file. You cannot run your Web site unless you use the ASP.NET Development Server, which is the default Web server for file-system Web sites. Alternatively, you can set project options to open the browser and point to the Web site using IIS. For details, see How to: Specify the Web Server for Web Projects in Visual Studio.
Debugging a local or remote IIS Web site project	You cannot attach to a process that is running under the IIS worker process because it requires administrative privileges.

Creating a new local or remote IIS Web site project

You cannot make changes to the Internet Information Services (IIS) metabase (for example, creating new entries) because it requires administrative privileges. This affects your ability to configure some settings in the Web.config file.

Opening a local or remote IIS Web site project

You cannot make changes to the IIS metabase (for example, creating new entries) because it requires administrative privileges. This affects your ability to configure some settings in the Web.config file.

You cannot run your Web site unless you use the ASP.NET Development Server, which is the default Web server for file-system Web sites. Alternatively, you can set project options to open the browser and point to the Web site using IIS. For details, see How to: Specify the Web Server for Web Projects in Visual Studio.

Debugging a local or remote IIS Web site project

You cannot attach to a process that is running under the IIS worker process because it requires administrative privileges.

Working with Web Projects in Visual Studio as a Non-Administrative User

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