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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-29T07:34:38+00:00

I have a problem which I guessed would be really simple to solve… but

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I have a problem which I guessed would be really simple to solve… but duh.

I’m deploying a .NET application with VS2010. I have a C# Windows Forms project and a Deployment Project. I need the installer to run with admin privileges because the app is installed for all users and an entry to the registry is made.

When starting the setup.exe I’m not prompted for privilege elevation. The installer will just start and suggest to install to Program Files (x86) which is good. After clicking next the installer runs and finished with a success message. Which is basically a lie because it did not successfully install. Instead it puts the apps exe directly to C:\.

How can I make the installer ask for admin privileges. Or do I have to rely on my customer to right click the setup and select “Run as Admin” which is very error prone?

Clarifications about my setup:

  • In the File System view of the setup project I added (among other things) “Primary Output from project01 (Active)” and “Build Outputs from project01 (Active) to “Application Folder”. I also added a shortcut to “Primary Output” into “User’s Programs Menu\CompanyName\ProgramName”.
  • In the Registry View I added an entry to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT because I need to register an url handler.

I also modified the setup’s settings: I set InstallAllUsers to True because it is supposed to do so.

When I build and start the setup.exe by double clicking (or by selecting Install from the project’s context menu) I always get the same result: The installer runs without asking for admin privileges, ask for an install location (which I leave at the default C:\Program Files(x86)\Company\ProgramName) and then procedes after clicking Next. As a result, the exe is put directly in C:\ and the shortcut created of course points into Nirvana.

If I run the setup.exe manually as Administrator things work fine. But this cannot seriously be the way to go.

So how can I tell the setup to always run as Admin?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I think this is a perfectly valid question, is a real problem, and has an actual explanation.

    I recently ran across this problem. In my case, the cause is that the AlwaysInstallElevated policy was set on the computer through GPO. The policy was set to 1 in the per-machine policy and 0 in the per-user policy. These policies can be manually set to reproduce the effect it has on MSI installers

    Using msexec /log install.log /i Deploy.msi, I had a setup log and there were strings in it like this:

    MSI (s) (A4:8C) [13:00:42:885]: Ignoring disallowed property TARGETDIR
MSI (s) (A4:8C) [13:00:42:885]: Ignoring disallowed property VSDNETURLMSG
MSI (s) (A4:8C) [13:00:42:885]: Ignoring disallowed property VSDNETMSG

    It seems that Visual Studio does not set the SecureCustomProperties in the MSI correctly and post processing of some sort is needed. I think that moving to WiX may be a better long term solution instead.

    A blog post on MSDN is what I found that helped me find the root cause to this problem.

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