Windows Developer Power Tools

17.5 Opening a Command Window with Admin Privileges Using MakeMeAdmin.cmd

Developing software as an Administrator, or running daily as one, is a serious security risk. Additionally, it may cause you to miss privilege-level-related issues in your software until late in the development cycle or, worse yet, after the software’s shipped.

However, if you always run as a regular user, you’re unable to do the occasional tasks that do require administrative privileges, such as working with the IIS management snap-in, setting object permissions, or starting/stopping services. You should do the bulk of your work in the basic user security context, but you can’t completely sacrifice productivity by forcing yourself to log into a new account each time you need to do an administrative task.

Aaron Margosis, author of PrivBar and a member of Microsoft’s .NET Security team, has come up with a great tool to help you solve this problem. MakeMeAdmin.cmd spawns a command prompt that runs under your normal user account, but in a completely new login session in which your account has been added to the local system’s Administrators group.

MakeMeAdmin.cmd at a Glance
Tool	MakeMeAdmin.cmd
Version covered	None given
Home page	http://blogs.msdn.com/aaron_margosis/archive/2004/07/24/193721.aspx
Power Tools page	http://www.windevpowertools.com/tools/99
Summary	Provides access to a command window with Admin privileges
License ...