I have made an application that copy the vb components to the system32 folder of the windows and register those components with “regsvr32”. It works well in Window XP, but in Windows Vista and Windows7 it can’t perform its task without right clicking the application .exe file and selecting “Run as administrator”. Is there any code in vb that automatically allows the application .exe file to run as administrator?
To do precisely what you ask you can add an application manifest that specifies an execution level of "requireAdministrator" within it. However this means the application will always run elevated, and the user will also have to provide admin credentials or approve elevated execution for every run (UAC prompt).
Please just do things the right way.
I'm going to second Bob's excellent comment above and suggest that you use a tool like Inno Setup http://www.jrsoftware.org (it's free) to build a proper installer. One of the benefits of using a proper setup tool is that the setup application can request to the OS to run with administrative privileges without using external files and manifests to make that happen. The setup.exe that you build will have the necessary code built in to ask the OS for elevated privilege.
In windows 7, we can go to the properties of the file or an application exe file and then "Compatibility" tab. Then check the "Run this program as an administrator".
It will force the application to be executed under the administrator privilege.
I used this and my problem was solved.
Related
I've written a Windows application. I want other applications to be able to programmatically launch my application. How can I achieve that and what are the considerations involved?
Edit: To clarify, I'm not asking how other applications can launch my application; I'm asking what I can do to ensure that other applications are able to launch my application.
To be able to launch an application without having to know the explicit path to where it is installed, you need to register it with Windows by adding it to the App Paths registry tree.
This is typically done during application installation.
See MSDN - Application Registration
In Windows, there is no security preventing an application from running another application (in user mode at least, to run in admin mode would require the other program to be executed in admin mode, or else to prompt the user to run it in admin mode). The other application simply needs to know the path to the location of your .exe file and it can execute it. If the other program doesn't know the exact path, but it knows where to look and what your program .exe is called, it can search for it in the file system before executing it as well.
As for specifically how they would launch your program's .exe file, this will depend on the the language their program is written in as to how the system API to launch the .exe is called.
I have created a win32 application in Visual Studio 2010. the application is sort of installer, it copies an exe to system32 folder.
The exe which is copied by installer is executed every time the windows is restarted. i have created an entry for it in the registry, now the problem i am having is i want to run that exe as administrator every time it is executed.
I can change the properties of the exe to run as administrator, but it works only for the specific system, i have mentioned my application is an installer, so it is quite hectic to change the privileges at every system.
Kindly guide me how can i solve this problem
First of all, please note that privileges and rights are specified for users rather than executables.
In order to have an executable run elevated, you typically need to add an application manifest to your executable that specifies the requireAdministrator execution level. Such an application will fail to run if the user is not an administrator, or cannot find an administrator to perform over-the-shoulder elevation.
Now, this probably won't help you much. If you want elevation to happen at logon (assuming your registry setting is HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run) then this will lead to the user being presented with a UAC elevation dialog every time the program starts. I cannot imagine that behaviour is desirable.
Perhaps the cleanest way to avoid all of this would be to convert your application to run as a service. Services run in session 0 and are not subject to UAC. Simply run the service under a user account that has sufficient rights.
One final point, that I cannot stress enough. You should not be copying files to system32. That is the system folder and it belongs to the system.
My MFC app usually runs with admin rights, however, there is one operation which needs admin privileges (activation of the software where the status must be saved to HKLM).
For now, I created two .exe files: The ordinary app and "Activation.exe" which must run as admin and has requestedExecutionLevel=requireAdministrator in the Manifest. The activation is started with a button which makes ShellExecute(Activation.exe).
However, both applications share lots of code so I would like to merge the two exe into one exe. But how do I make sure then that specific parts of the code are executed with admin privileges? This method should/must be compatible down to NT4.
One idea is to integrate the functionality of Activation.exe in the main exe using a switch (e.g. "myapp.exe -activate"). A small bootstrapper makes sure that it can only run as admin (requireAdministrator in Manifest) and does nothing more than ShellExec(myapp.exe -activate). But is this really the best way?
I don't know if it's the best way (no-one answered) but I did that now :) The bootstrapper has just requireAdministrator in the Manifest and does a ShellExecute to the main executeable with switch "/Activate" ...
I would typically use a call to ShellExecuteEx with a verb of runas to launch any executable as administrator, even if it's manifested asInvoker.
Note that on systems where UAC has been disabled, the resulting launch may not receive administrator privileges; I believe this caveat also applies to the approach of launching an exe manifested requireAdministrator.
I have a console application written in c#, which downloads a file to program files. So of course it needs to run as admin. This program gets called from a Win32 C++ application which almost certainly is not running as administrator
What are my options. How can I get this to work on UAC and non UAC enabled boxes ( I don't know if there needs to be separate solution in each case )
Oh and the console app is in .NET 2.0
On a machine with UAC you need to include a manifest resource to specify that you want the process to run as administrator.
On a machine without UAC you will simply have to instruct your users that they need to run it as a user in the administrators group. Almost all users of XP (the version that you will most commonly encounter without UAC) are in the administrators group so you won't encounter many problems.
I never tried it, but this can probably be done using the
CreateProcessAsUser Function.
i was making an installer for my app its working fine on xp but on vista the UAC is giving problem unless i do a run as administrator the Unexpected error appears when i run my app afters installation, any idea?
i am installing the application in C:\xfolder\x
There is nothing you can do. You MUST run the installer as administrator.
As for the application, you will also need to run it as administrator with elevated priviledges but thre are options to make it ask automatically for elevation via application manifest. You can do a search on stackoverflow.com because there are more post related to this issue.
Here is a link to a post that might help.
Here are a couple more usefull link on app manifest and UAC:
App Manifest (1)
App Manifest (2)
UAC technology.
They are in C# but then again translating to VB.net is like a walk in the park.
You can make a windows service. And put all operations that require elevated rights into that service. You install the service as SYSTEM account and you communicate with the client via .net remoting or any other way for vb6.
if your app exe is an active x exe then you will need to register all the ocx file using regsvr command and then register your exe with regsvr32 command, for an active class to be used in win vista it first must be registered. make a batch to do these registration.