Running Visual Studio without admin rights

Question

We work on XP Pro workstations and use Visual Studio 2008 & 2010 to develop winforms, web and web services against local IIS and SQL Express instances.

We currently have local admin rights on our main machine account. The proposal is to move to a low rights account for our amin login but to have another local account with local admin rights that we then use to elevate where needed.

Are there any issues developing and debugging under this setup that would affect developer productivity?

Answer 1

From experience you can't install things like NUnit in your reduced priviledge account - that shouldn't be a problem for you as you can just type in the details of your higher priviledged account (it was a problem for us as we didn't have that). Also you'll need to do a similar thing if you're firing up services / IIS, etc. Again as you have it to hand it shouldn't be a problem.

My conclusion was that you could develop as a non-admin as long as you know the admin password - but if you don't know the admin password, you are going to be in for a very frustrating time!