What account to use with Visual Studio 2003?

[Geoffrey Pennington]

I just moved from a Windows 2000 /VS 2002 development environment to XP / VS
2003. First I found that in the new environment you must be a member of the
Administrators group if the worker process (aspnet_wp.exe) runs under an
account other than your own, and by default the worker process runs under
the "ASPNET" account, which is specified as "Machine" in the machine.config
file. So I made myself part of the administrators group, but found that I
could now over-write read-only files, such as files under source control.
That seemed like a bad idea, so I took myself out of the administrators
group and modified machine.config so the process would run under my own
account. Now I find that my account lacks permissions to run aspnet_wp.exe.
At least I think that is the problem, even though I gave my account "full
control" over that file.

All this effort seems absurd. All I want to do is edit projects in Visual
Studio 2003. Isn't there a simple way to set up the accounts?

Much obliged.
Geoff.

 

[Dennis Homann]

Geoffrey,

you do not have to be a member of the Administrators group to develop web
applications.
Being a member of the "VS Developers" group is sufficient.

The worker process should run under the "ASPNET" account for security
reasons. I have not
found it necessary to change that setting except for one occasion when I
attached a profiler to
that process.

When I installed VS.NET 2003 the installer automatically added my account to
the "VS Developers" group.
I am not sure why that didn't happen on your machine. Maybe you installed it
under a different account?

Hope this helps,
Dennis

 

[Geoffrey Pennington]

Dang. I just checked, and I was already a member of the "VS Developers"
group. "Debugger Users" also. Something else must be missing in my setup. If
I can't find it I'll just leave myself part of "Administrators" and live
with source control being essentially disabled.

Thanks,
Geoff.