IDE requires administrator privileges

[ilengyel]

Is there a way to run the InstallShield IDE without elevating the privileges under Vista and Windows 7?

Main reasons that we wish to run "as invoker" and not "as administrator":
1. Security - InstallShield development environment connects to the internet and if it is compromised, a hacker would be given full control of the machine. (Microsoft mitigated this by having Internet Explorer run in Low integrity mode)
2. Testing - When a developer tests their installation package it should be with the UAC dialogs. Pressing the "Run" button in the tool bar bypasses this since the IDE is already elevated. (work around for this is to open the Release folder and run the installer there)
3. Usability - Every time the IDE is launched we need to go through the UAC sequence. Turning off UAC on our machines is not acceptable.. see poits 1 and 2

This comment was first made in IS2008 beta:
http://community.flexerasoftware.com/showthread.php?t=167675

Things like COM extraction can be isolated, where only that action requires elevation. (or even better - use Registry redirection to a non-admin location for the purpose of extracting the information)

[MichaelU]

We are examining this for the future. There are a few other places where running without administrator privileges has poor ramifications, and we need to clean these up as well as possible before we can consider changing the default.

That said, the IDE as a whole works fairly well, so if this is a strong enough desire that you'd do it even though it meant running in an unsupported mode, it's possible to edit the manifest to change things. I've sometimes wished that Windows allowed an override to Run as Non-Administrator so editing the manifests wouldn't be required.

[Ivan_Petroff]

MichaelU wrote:
We are examining this for the future. There are a few other places where running without administrator privileges has poor ramifications, and we need to clean these up as well as possible before we can consider changing the default.

There is 2011 and the IDE has not been fixed yet.

In order to run IDE without administrative privileges you should read the following article: http://www.vista4beginners.com/Disable-UAC-for-certain-applications

Short summary:
1. Download the Microsoft Application Compatibility tooklit
2. Create an application fix for ISDEV.EXE by checking the RunAsInvoker compatibility mode.
3. Save the application fix database into a file (*.sdb).
4. Install this *.sdb to your target system.

At least IDE runs under a standard user account after that.

[zeppiii]

I'd like to request this feature as well.

Beyond being just plain irritating, programs that stubbornly require elevated privileges in Win7 and Vista are security risks and make it difficult to work within an organization's development environment.

For example, my Windows domain account is in a special developers domain group that gives me access to network shared resources. And, whenever I run the IDE in elevated mode I am running as a different account-- technically speaking-- and this prevents me from accessing these resources, especially the mapped network shares/drives that are set up for the domain account!

[deramor]

Though an old post and Vista is quite far in the rear view, this feature is still helpful today.  My own use case requires me to run in a protected environment sometimes.  This environment disables running elevated processes.  Although I can eventually get elevation for a short time to do what I need to do, there is a delay.  When all I need to do is make a quite edit it seems like overkill to require elevation.

Even if all the building and debugging operations were disabled if not elevated, just being able to make project edits would solve my problem.