Question

When using Visual Studio 2008 or 2010, every time you attach to IIS w3wp.exe you get the Attach Security Warning:

How do you turn this of?

It would be cool to know also, how to keep it attached for longer, as this seems to time out after a while.

Also, I’ve tried the Microsoft Docs page Security Warning: Attaching to a process owned by an untrusted user can be dangerous, but it didn’t work

Answer 1

Also found in the article mentioned by Tzury, but to sum up the answers in this thread:

Make sure Visual Studio is not running when changing the registry key or it will be overwritten on exit with the old value

Visual Studio 2022: Follow these instructions, then reboot.
Visual Studio 2019: Follow these instructions, then reboot.

For older versions of Visual Studio:

Change (or create) the following registry key to 1:

Visual Studio 2008 HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Debugger\DisableAttachSecurityWarning

Visual Studio 2010 HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Debugger\DisableAttachSecurityWarning

Visual Studio 2012
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\11.0\Debugger\DisableAttachSecurityWarning

Visual Studio 2013
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\Debugger\DisableAttachSecurityWarning

Visual Studio 2015
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0\Debugger\DisableAttachSecurityWarning

For VS2015, you might need to create the Registry Key referenced above.

1. Make sure Visual Studio is not running, and open the Registry Editor.
2. Navigate to
   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0\Debugger, right-click and create a new DWORD:

• Name: DisableAttachSecurityWarning
• Value: 1.

Update: If you don’t want to open up regedit, save this gist as a *.reg file and run it (imports the keys for all VS versions lower than VS2017).

Visual Studio 2017

The configuration is saved in a private registry location, see this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/41122603/67910

For VS 2017+, save this gist as a *.ps1 file and run it as admin, or copy and paste the following code in a ps1 file:

#IMPORTANT: Must be run as admin

New-PSDrive HKU Registry HKEY_USERS

dir $env:LOCALAPPDATA\Microsoft\VisualStudio\*.* | % {
    #https://stackoverflow.com/a/41122603

    $filePath = "$_\privateregistry.bin"
    if (Test-Path $filePath) {
        reg load 'HKU\VSPrivateRegistry\' $filePath

        $BasePath='HKU:\VSPrivateRegistry\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio'

        if (Test-Path $BasePath) {
            $keysResult=dir $BasePath
            $keysResult | ? {$_.Name -match '\\\d+\.\d+_[^_]+$'} | % {
                $keyName = $_.Name -replace 'HKEY_USERS','HKU:'
                Write-Host -ForegroundColor Green "ADDING key to reg path $keyName in file $filePath"
                New-ItemProperty -Path $keyName\Debugger -Name DisableAttachSecurityWarning -Value 1
            }
            $keysResult.Handle.Close()    
        }
        [gc]::collect()

        reg unload 'HKU\VSPrivateRegistry'   
    }
}
Remove-PSDrive HKU