HowTo: Have Visual Studio always run as administrator on Windows 8

In my previous post about being unable to access the iis metabase I wanted my Visual Studio to ‘Run as Administrator’ on my Windows 8 machine. I only managed to get this working for the pinned taskbar icon and not for items in the jumplist or for items you open by double clicking them. The solution to check the box ‘Run as Administrator’ on the compatibility tab of the file properties for devenv.exe was not a solution, because there is no more Compatibility tab in Windows 8 :).

But there is a way to have devenv.exe always ‘Run as Administrator’. Here’s how:

• Right click devenv.exe en select Troubleshoot compatibility (first picture)
• Select the option ‘Troubleshoot program’ after the wizard has finished detecting issues
• Choose the ‘The program requires additional permissions’ option (second picture). The wizard will apply the ‘Run as Administrator’ setting to devenv.exe
• Click ‘Test the program…’ (third picture – the wizard requires this) and close the wizard
• Enjoy!

• HowTo
• Visual Studio
• Windows 8