Question

I installed VS 2008 Team System on a brand new Windows 7 installation, and I can’t drag and drop files to it to open them (ie: .config files)

• I could do this on Windows XP
• I can open them from the File -> Open
  menu

Do you know of any setting I might be missing? I already had a lot of fun with UAC and having to run VS as an administrator (even though I am one on the local machine) and a lot of other small stuff that’s new on windows 7.

Answer 1

This is not a bug, but a security feature. To expand on Juan Manuel’s answer:

This is not a problem specific to VS2008 or Windows 7. It happens between any applications with different integrity levels. In Vista or higher (Server 2008, Windows 7), this can be caused by UAC and having some apps elevated and others not. The application with a lower integrity level cannot send messages to the application with a higher integrity level. In your case, Windows Explorer, running as a non-priviledged user, cannot send drag-and-drop messages to Visual Studio, which I assume is running elevated (as admin). The same would happen if you tried to drag-and-drop files into an elevated Notepad, for example.

Some workarounds are:

1. disable UIPI so lower integrity apps can send messages to higher integrity apps (security risk)
2. disable UAC so all your apps (including Windows Explorer) run elevated (bigger security risk)
3. run an elevated Windows Explorer (risky? and seems like a lot of work just to avoid File -> Open)
4. use a non-elevated Visual Studio (least security risk, but doesn’t support some scenarios, such as debugging ASP.NET apps in IIS, iirc)