Execute PowerShell as an administrator from C#

Question

I have the following C# code

using (RunspaceInvoke invoker = new RunspaceInvoke())
{
  invoker.Invoke("Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted");
  // ...
}

which gives me the exception

Access to the registry key 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\PowerShell\1\ShellIds\Microsoft.PowerShell' is denied.

According to this, the solution is to start PowerShell as an administrator.

Ordinarily, this can be accomplished by right-clicking PowerShell and selecting "Run as Administrator". Is there a way to do this programmatically?

Answer 1

I know this is an old post, but we ran into this same problem recently.

We had to scope the execution policy on the machine running the C# code by running the following from PowerShell...

Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

When we had done this previously, without scoping, we were setting the execution policy for Administrator. Visual Studio \ C# was running as the current user, causing it to fail with insufficient permissions.