Creating DevExpress.NET toolbox icons for non-admin users
At work we use the DevExpress .NET widget toolkit to build flashy GUIs. I recently repaved my dev box, and now run as a non-admin user most of the time. This often causes problems with badly-behaved software, which apparently includes the DevExpress .NET toolkit.
If I run the installer as an admin, it creates convenient toolbox items in Visual Studio 2008 for dropping various DevExpress controls into the forms I build. However, my non-admin user doesn’t get these toolbox items. There’s a separate tool, the Toolbox Creator, which ships with DevExpress for the purpose of putting these back, but it doesn’t work without admin privs (see here).
DevExpress’s handy advise is:
The ToolBoxCreator creates toolbox icons only for the user for which it is launched. And, this user must have Administrator rights. This behavior is by design.
Besides, running the VS 2008 under a user without administrator rights leads to many issues
Well, fuck you. Maybe you can’t write code that behaves properly without admin privs, but that doesn’t mean I can’t.
I figured out a hack to get their shit working. Use Aaron Margosis’ MakeMeAdmin batch file to create a command window which is running as you, but with admin privs. cd into the DevExpress Tools directory, then run the target of the ToolboxCreator shortcut. Voila!
For the most part I’m happy with the DevExpress toolkit, but this incident really pissed me off. There’s no earthly reason why the Toolbox Creator needs admin rights, since the toolbox settings are per-user. It’s just lazy programming.
Tags: devexpress, Migrated from Drupal, sucks, tech diary
October 26th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
I wonder when/if M$ will put sudo or something similar into their OS’s. The idea has been around since 1980, and it looks what the app MakeMeAdmin emulates. I guess that would make too much sense for M$ to do something like that…
October 26th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Well, one could argue that UAC in Vista is conceptually similar to sudo, inasmuchas one runs w/o admin privs most of the time.
MakeMeAdmin actually emulates UAC more than it does sudo. With sudo, you’re allowed to run some/all commands as ‘root’, once you reauthenticate. With UAC and MakeMeAdmin, you do everything as your user account, which simply enjoys elevated privs once in a while.
Frankly, as a concept I prefer UAC/MakeMeAdmin, since it’s a bit more seamless, but the implementation leaves a LOT to be desired. I’d happily take a solid ’sudo’ implementation if Windows offered one.