Running Visual Studio 2008 as Administrator

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Visual Studio 2008 on Windows Vista requires you to run it in as an Administrator to be able to access local IIS web sites. I emphasized Windows Vista because I don’t remember having encountered the same issue when I was still using Windows XP. This is annoying especially when you are opening your source code by double-clicking the solution file from the Windows Explorer. You’ll be required to close Visual Studio, do a right-click on the Visual Studio 2008 shortcut and select the Run as Administrator.

To make sure you’re running Visual Studio 2008 as an Administrator everytime you’re launching it from the shortcut or by double-clicking the Visual Studio solution file, you have to set the following exe’s to run as administrator:

  • C:Program FilesMicrosoft Visual Studio 9.0Common7IDEdevenv.exe – Executable file of the Visual Studio IDE.
  • C:Program FilesCommon Filesmicrosoft sharedMSEnvVSLauncher.exe – Executable file for the Visual Studio Version Selector. It is the default program to run Visual Studio files.

Here are the steps:

  1. Navigate to the location of the devenv.exe in Windows Explorer.
  2. Right-click on the exe and click on Properties.

  3. In the Compatibility tab, be sure the “Run this program as an administrator” is checked.

  4. Do the steps with the VSLauncher.exe.
  5. Select a *.sln file and double-click to test it.
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7 Responses to Running Visual Studio 2008 as Administrator

  1. Scribilus says:

    Thanks for posting this! This works for Windows 7 too BTW.

  2. Rich says:

    Cheers this is useful

  3. belugabob says:


    This seems to work for me, but I couldn’t find the vslauncher.exe file.

    (Windows 7 & VS 2008)

    • Jojit Soriano says:

      Is that a Windows 7 64-bit? If yes, you can find the said devenv.exe and vslauncher.exe from C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE and C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\microsoft shared\MSEnv respectively.

  4. ram says:

    thanks, this is useful.

  5. Stuart Clark says:

    cheers thanks very much

  6. Gayatri says:

    Thank you very much..It was very useful

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