Visual Studio Administrator mode in Windows 10

Question

Not really sure of my exact question, but here is the situation:

I have an application (WinForms, C# .Net) that I am developing in Visual Studio 2012. It does a lot of things but the important bit is that it needs to read files from a certain location.

In this case, the location of the files is on a server and my machine has a mapped network drive setup for accessing the files. I can manually navigate to the files with Windows Explorer fine.

I have the following line in my code which is highlighting the issue:

System.IO.File.Exists("X:\\A Folder\\a_file.txt");

And that file does exist in that location. However this is where the problem occurs: if I build the solution and run the .exe directly from the "bin" folder (double-click). The code is fine, and it finds the file. But if I run it with visual studio then I get a "file not found" exception.

I am putting this down to the fact that Visual Studio is running in "Administrator" mode (I forget why I needed this, but I do). Now this makes sense if you consider that the "administrator" account does not have the "X:\" drive mapped. However, this has never been a problem until I upgraded to Windows 10 last week.

So my question is:

Does Visual Studio Administrator mode work differently in Windows 10? In this case, does it handle mapped network drives differently?

It's worth noting I upgraded from Windows 7, so I cannot confirm if this issue is also present in 8 and 8.1 or not.

And before anyone asks, let's just say it has to be a mapped drive. No UNC paths allowed!

Answer 1

So I have found a solution/workaround. Kind of seems like a wasted bounty now, so if someone has other suggestions that are better then please post and I will review them and award as applicable. Or even if somebody can make a more detailed version of my solution then I will award that one.

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The issue is probably not specific to Visual Studio, but would occur with any application running with elevated privileges. Anyway, the solution I found is to add a registry key that enables the same shared drives to be accessible when running in administrator mode.

The registry key location is:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Policies/System

And the key to add is called:

EnableLinkedConnections

And should be created as a DWORD with a value of 1 (0x00000001)

I checked with the machines running Windows 7 and they do NOT have this key, yet they still work fine. So I expect this isn't the only solution, but it does seem to work (no side effects noted yet). I would assume that Windows 10 has a specific setting somewhere that by default prevents mapped drives from automatically being available with "run as administrator".

For reference, I found this information here.

In fact, here is a more "official" recommendation for using this reg key.