| Author: |
Carlos J. Quintero (Microsoft MVP) |
Applies to: |
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 |
| Date: |
September 2011 |
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Introduction
This article explains
a problem that can happen when uninstalling an add-in for the current user (not
for all users) using Visual Studio 2005.
More Information
Visual Studio 2005 requires to be run with administrator rights (this limitation
was removed in Visual Studio 2008). The process file of Visual Studio is
devenv.exe. There are several ways to execute Visual Studio 2005 as
administrator:
- Right-click the devenv.exe file or shortcut to it and in the context menu click
the "Run as administrator" menu entry. This approach requires to do it so every
time and therefore is not the most friendly way.
- Show the properties window of a shortcut to devenv.exe, and in the "Shortcut"
tab click the "Advanced..." button and check the "Run as administrator" option.
This approach only affects that shortcut, not other shortcuts and not clicking
the devenv.exe file directly or executing devenv.exe through automation.
- Show the properties window of the devenv.exe file or shortcut to it, and in the
"Compatibility" tab check the "Run this program as an administrator" option.
This approach affects any way of executing the devenv.exe process, either
directly, with any shortcut or through automation. Windows 7 64-bit stores this
setting in the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers, name "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft
Visual Studio 8\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe, data "RUNASADMIN".
When a Visual Studio add-in is loaded for the first time, typically it creates
its commands, which the add-in should not delete when unloaded because keyboard
bindings would be lost. Rather, the uninstaller of the add-in should delete them
when the add-in is uninstalled. See the article
HOWTO: Removing commands and UI elements during Visual Studio .NET add-in uninstallation.
To delete the commands, the uninstaller must execute a custom action with either of these approaches:
- Executing the command-line devenv.exe /ResetAddin <myaddin> /Command File.Exit
- Creating an instance of EnvDTE.DTE through automation (ex: CreateObject("VisualStudio.DTE.10.0")),
iterating its DTE.Commands, and removing the ones that belong to the add-in.
Consider this scenario:
- Visual Studio 2005 is set to execute as administrator with the approach #3
(devenv.exe always requires admin rights, no matter how it is launched).
- The user is uninstalling an add-in that is only for the current user (not for
all users), and therefore both the installer and uninstaller don't require admin
rights, they use the user account of the developer (non-admin).
With any approach to delete the commands, since the uninstaller needs to execute
the devenv.exe process and this process is set to run as administrator, the
custom action would fail.
A workaround to this problem is to make the uninstaller to remove the registry
entry indicated before, perform the custom action and restore it.
Related articles
Go back to the 'Resources for Visual Studio .NET extensibility' section for more articles like this
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