Administrator Mode

OK, so Visual Studio 2008 likes to run with elevated privileges in order to access web sites on the local IIS server. That’s not so bad aside from losing the ability to drag and drop items into the IDE from Explorer. Then, about 4 weeks into using Windows Vista and Visual Studio 2008, I hit an odd snag. About 3 weeks ago I went to open a solution containing a web project, only to get this all too familiar message:

To access local IIS Web sites, you must run Visual Studio in the context of an administrator account. By default, Windows runs applications in a limited-privilege user account even when you are logged on to the computer as an administrator. To run Visual Studio with administrative privileges, right-click the Visual Studio icon and then click ‘Run as administrator.

Turns out, I WAS running Visual Studio under Administrative mode; however it didn’t seem to be recognizing this fact. After cursing Bill a few times I closed Visual Studio, re-opened it from the actual executable itself running as administrator; same deal. I rebooting my computer only to find that it still did not work, and on top of that my sound card was not working, however device manager said that is was operational and no errors were reported in any of the Event logs.

Now, no web projects and no sound card, what’s next? I open up the IIS7 manager to check on my web settings when I find this:

The red “X” on the Default Web Site and a status of “Access Denied” for the web site in the web site list. I go to check my applications pools, and sure enough, the same thing:

The odd thing about all of this was that I could still access all of the sites in my Default Web Site, either using the “Browse” command from the IIS Manager or simply opening Internet Explorer and going to http://localhost/whatever. I attempted to run Windows Update which also gave me cryptic errors such as “WAS does not appear to be enabled”. This was about the time I opened a support ticket with Microsoft.

Tinker Not

Little did I realize as I told the IIS team support technician that there were no recent changes to my computer. There was however one significant detail that I didn’t think was significant at the time: I had rebooted my computer. Typically I simply lock my workstation for the night or for the weekend and perhaps reboot once every other month. Turns out the day before this all started happening I had rebooted my machine for the 3^rd time since installing Windows Vista, this was a mistake.

Turns out when you change DCOM security settings on your machine using dcomcnfg, and Windows Vista warns you that things may stop working, and you ignore these warning it’s really YOUR fault your machine sucks and not Microsoft’s. After all, I was warned when I inadvertently tried to fully open all DCOM and MSDTC permissions on my box which I was accustomed to doing COM development on previous versions of Windows. Two little drop down boxes that I had set were the cause for all of this grief, “DCOM Default Authentication Level” and “Default Impersonation Level“.

These were the settings I had chosen without guidance or really much thought:

Turns out these configuration changes are BAD! Do not do this unless you want a Vista pile of worthless garbage under your desk. Of course these changes didn’t start affecting services until I had rebooted, a couple of weeks after making this change which I had completely forgotten about.

Below is what I should have kept, and sure enough shortly after resetting these and rebooting not only did IIS 7 begin working again as expected, Visual Studio, my sound card, Windows Update, my CD Burner as well as my sanity were back in check as well.

It was all thanks to this post that I found on an MSDN forum while trying to troubleshoot my sound card that lead to start looking at COM permissions. I followed all the steps in this post and many more similar ones to no avail, until I vaguely remember screwing around with the DCOM security configuration and more importantly the nice warning message this had given me when I changes those settings. Sure enough after changing them back I’m back in business and promise to never ignore Bill again.

Thanks Bill

So you can say what you want about Microsoft and Windows Vista, but I love it and can’t wait for some of the new and emerging stuff that’s soon to come. After all, had I been using Linux or a Mac, the OS would have let me be stupid without a warning and I would have never been the wiser. So for those developers and techies that like to tinker, the best of luck to ya, I’m sticking to Windows defaults from here on out, they’re really not that bad anyway.

You can’t always blame Bill when Vista breaks is a post from: Chad Scharf's Weblog. For software consulting services please visit Scharf Holdings, LLC