Visual Studio Debugger needs Admin rights. However Cyber Essentials Plus requires all admin rights to be removed from a user. How can we get this to work together?

Question

As part of a new company policy, we need to disable Admin rights on all users/laptops in order to obtain the Cyber Essentials Plus certification. However, the development team need access to the Visual Studio Debugger

Visual Studio Debugger needs Admin rights.

How can we get this to work together? Is there a way to have Cyber Essentials Plus (and therefor no admin rights) as well as have Debugger work accurately/correctly.

Answer 1

The VS debugger does not need admin rights and hasn't for a very long time. There used to be a "Debugging" group that you could put users into. That group isn't created anymore but at least based upon the docs here it seems like it still works. But maybe just put your devs into the Power Users group and that is likely sufficient.

Note that it depends on the type of apps you're building but some things may require admin privileges and therefore such a restrictive policy may be an issue. For example, registering an assembly in the GAC so it can be called by SSIS requires admin privileges. Debugging a windows driver would also likely need admin privileges. If you are building a web app and using IIS Express then you would need to change it's permissions to not require running as admin. There are other cases as well. If you are using full IIS then you must run as admin.

The company policy should ideally allow elevation (aka UAC) when these situations occur.

Answer 2

Hello @newtmimsy-1498,

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A forum.

Whether the admin rights are needed depends on what you are going to debug and how you debug. In following situations, if you don't assign corresponding rights to VS debugger, it won't work.

See this document: User permissions and Visual Studio

You need administrator permissions to complete the following tasks:

Kind Regards,

Tianyu

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