NOTE: I’m no longer maintaining the Command Prompt Round-Up. Instead, visit the Command Prompt Here Generator.

I won’t lie - I’ve been doing most of my development up until now in Windows XP (not by choice) and as I move into Windows Server 2008 territory, there are little gotchas I’m finding as I work as a non-admin user. The one I ran into today is that our build script runs regsvr32 to register and unregister NCover during the build (so different products/projects can use different versions of NCover without having to actually install them). That’s only something an admin user can do.

The problem comes in when I right-click on a folder and choose “VS.NET 2008 CMD Prompt Here” - it’s running as me, not an administrator. Even if I do a runas /user:Administrator "msbuild default.msbuild" from there it’s not doing what I want it to because the environment’s not set up or whatever. Point is, I needed “VS.NET 2008 Admin CMD Prompt Here” so that’s what I made.

I updated my “Command Prompt Here” Round-Up to include “VS.NET 2008 Admin CMD Prompt Here” so you can download that and away you go. It basically just does the runas /user:Administrator before running vsvarsall.bat, but it works great from what I can tell. YMMV.

Something else I found while I was searching to see if someone else had already done this - the Elevation Power Toys over on TechNet. This is a gargantuan array of scripts and installers for everything from “Command Prompt Here (as Administrator)” to “PowerShell Prompt Here (as SYSTEM)” and more. It’s well worth the time to check out - enough so that I’m not replicating all of that in my own roundup. Go ahead and grab those Power Toys. You’ll be glad you did.