With the arrival of my new laptop I have decided to give running (and developing) as a non-admin a try. This is one of those things that everybody agrees on as being important, but very few people actually do.

I've discovered that there are quite a lot of things that you would do on a daily basis require elevated privileges. These include: updating virus-definitions, changing the type of paper in the printer settings and renewing the IP Address. There are situations where selections that I've made didn't stick. One of the most annoying cases was the MS AntiSpyware tool: every time I logged on I was required redo all of the selections I had made. Although this particular product is still in beta, it does show that more people need to start running their systems as non-admin. (Or - at the very least - start testing their applications as one)

Most of the times it is very easy to circumvent the lack of privileges by using “runas”. The biggest problem I encountered was trying debug an ASP.NET-application; because the process that you are trying to debug runs under a different account, access is denied. The way I ended up solving the problem, was configuring the worker process to run under my own user account. This isn't a really elegant solution, but at least I can now debug again. I read somewhere that with Whidbey this would be solved by not using IIS to debug applications. VS would start its own webserver when trying to debug an application. One more reason to look forward to VS2005.