Making your assembly run "as Administrator" in Vista

By
This came from one of my favorites in the C# newsgroup, Willy DeNoyette. I'll simply post the questions and answers directly, since there is no need to modify it except for some formatting and cleanup:

Q) I need to restart the "Windows Audio Service" (audiosrv) via C#. I'm using the ServiceController Class to do this.
It is no problem under XP and no problem under vista if UAC is disabled.
But with enabled UAC i'm getting a "access refused" exception.
I also tried to do it via console with "net start ..." but the same error appears.
Three questions:
1. Is it possible to restart the "windows audio service" if UAC is
enabled ?

A) Yes when running as full "Administrator". That is start the console (cmd interpreter) by right clicking "Run as Administrator".

2. Why does the exception occur? If I do some other stuff, e.g. starting regedit via Process.Start() the user gets asked if he really wants that. I would expect the same behaviour for restarting
services.

A) The exception occurs because you are running as a standard user, only admins can start, stop .... services.
If you want the same behavior you'll have to insert a "manifest" in your executable file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0" >
<assemblyIdentity version="1.0.0.0"
processorArchitecture="X86"
name="someExecName"
type="win32" />
<description>Program description</description>
<trustInfo xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3">
<security>
<requestedPrivileges>
<requestedExecutionLevel level="requireAdministrator" />
</requestedPrivileges>
</security>
</trustInfo>
</assembly>



To add above manifest to the executable assembly, you have to run mt.exe like this:

mt -manifest somename.exe.manifest -outputresource:somename.exe;#1

PS change the someExecName and Program description to suit your needs...

3. If it's not possible at all: Can I find out programmatically
whether UAC is enabled?

A) See above

To further clarify:save the above manifest in a file called "some.exe.manifest", where someApp is the name of your executable file. Say you have "audioCntrl.exe", then you could name your manifest "audioCntrl.exe.manifest" and run mt.exe like:

mt -manifest audioCntrl.exe.manifest -outputresource:audioCntrl.exe;#1
Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. Anonymous6:49 PM

    The manifest doesn't even need to be embedded (though I think it is better to be in the exe). As long as the name matches and it's in the same folder as the exe - Vista will consider it. It's not only for .NET compiled executables either - any exe can be fit this way to require privileges.
    Now if I can just find a way to have an ActiveX control make Vista to ask for promotion the same way (embedding a manifest there doesn’t seem to work)…

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous2:31 PM

    The exe truns off "Run as Administrator" after installing it on client's computer. How to keep exe "run as administrator" after installation?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Some observations on Script Callbacks, "AJAX", "ATLAS" "AHAB" and where it's all going.

By
I've taken a more than cursory interest in the whole Remote Scripting (.NET species) vs. AJAX and now ATLAS discussion, mostly because I started using Remote Scripting since Microsoft first released it, and because I continued to refine it after seeing Brent Ashley's excellent work with JSRS, which was one of the first "real" cross-browser solutions back in 2000 (that's the turn of the Century for you history buffs). Now Bertrand Leroy, a Microsoft guy whose work I like , has authored some very interesting ASP.NET 2.0 script callback stuff that he points to on his blog, and he is obviously (at least, to me he is) involved quite heavily in the development of this new ATLAS infrastructure that they'll preview at PDC. Leroy's most recent post brings to the surface what I agree are the major differences between the "AJAX a - la .NET" approach as popularized by Michael Swartz with his AJAX.NET library, and Leroy's RefreshPanel, the ASP.NET 2.0 b...
Read more

IE7 - Vista: "Internet Explorer has stopped Working"

By
Image
This one was a bitch. All of a sudden for no reason at all, out of the blue, I get this dialog "internet Explorer has stopped working". I didn't install any new software, crap- I didn't do anything! So here I am using FIREFART to go on the internet and find out what to do! Damn! Good thing I've got the sucker on the same machine (I'm not "anti-Firefox", i just don't use it that much except to check my page renderings). The Fix The fix (at least for me): 1) Go into Control Panel, and choose "Internet Options". 2) Under the "Advanced" tab, press the "RESET" button at the lower right: Don't ask me why this happens, or why the fix works. That's a BUG, D00D - I don't care how you slice it!
Read more

FIREFOX / IE Word-Wrap, Word-Break, TABLES FIX

By
One of the most annoying things a developer (who would normally delight in writing code, not futzing with markup) can have is getting rendering issues between different browsers. The two biggest players are of course Internet Exploder and Firefart (as I lovingly like to refer to each). In most cases that's going to take care of 98 percent of your total site traffic. IE has had a proprietary "word-break" style attribute for a long time, and this made it into the CSS 3.0 spec. But that doesn't necessarily help you with Firefox right now. Firefox literally - (and I consider this completely idiotic, since it's been in their bug database for FIVE YEARS) does not have a reliable CSS style element to force table cell content to break in the middle of a word in order to stop the content from expanding your table / div off the page or over other content on the page. Here's a partial fix, which will work for most tables and browsers. The style declaration (I call it m...
Read more

System.Web.Caching.Cache, HttpRuntime.Cache, and IIS Recycles

By
Recently I chimed in on a newsgroup thread to an OP (Original Poster) who was questioning why he was losing Cache items. This individual would load a dataset from the Cache object into a local object to use to perform processing. He had been using httpcontext.current.cache and noticed that sometimes he was not able to get the dataset out of the cache. He tried switching to HttpRuntime.Cache and it seemed to help. The OP claimed that the application is under heavy hits, and once or twice every month he would see this error. He wanted to know why does the HttpContext.Current.Cache call work sometimes, while some other times does not. A couple of posters replied, one of whom is a respected MVP who usually makes very astute, high-quality posts. He posted," The cache is only valid during the life of the request. how is you[sic] code using the cache?" Somebody else (also pretty astute, usually) responded, "Cache is valid during lifetime of application not request.....". W...
Read more

FIX: Requested Registry Access is not allowed (Visual Studio 2008)

By
Symptom: in Visual Studio 2008, you attempt to add a new WebContentForm and associate it with a MasterPage. You receive an error dialog "Requested Reqistry Access is not allowed". Don't ask me what caused this; I'm guessing that the registry keys involved had their access denied due to removal of a previous version of Visual Studio, leaving the new guy (Visual Studio 2008) in the lurch. Here's the fix: Download "subinacl" here . This is a command-line tool that enables administrators to obtain security information about files, registry keys, and services, and transfer this information from user to user, from local or global group to group, and from domain to domain. After installing subinacl.exe (it will be in the C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools folder.), drop to a command prompt and run the following batch file, which you have saved in the same folder with the filename "FIX.bat": subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudi...
Read more