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Vista's UAC Prompt - Is it really that bad?

I just got done reading Mary J. Foley's post, Vista’s UAC needs an overhaul. Ideas?. Quite honestly, I haven't had much difficulty with it and it hasn't been annoying to me. Quite frankly, I think most of the uproar is coming from 3rd part software developers that have yet to account for the changes that come with UAC under Vista.

For those that don't know, with Vista, even though your Windows user account may have Administrator privileges, by default everything you do is run with normal user permissions. If a particular application or tool needs elevated privileges, the UAC prompt is displayed asking you to allow the application to run with Admin privileges.

Most properly developed applications shouldn't need Admin privileges. That's where the problem comes in and it's partly due to Microsoft's prior OS's which almost always ran with Admin privileges. Software developers, myself included, came to rely on that fact and when developing apps did all kinds of things like saving files to the C:\Program Files\AppName folder, writing to prohibited parts of the registry...you get the picture. Almost all of these bad practices can be solved by following "best practices"...saving information to the proper locations, etc.

In conclusion, I think we developers need to take responsibility for the bad practices we used in the past and fix our apps. Microsoft has published a lot about this and have given application developers a long time before releasing Vista to get them done. So let's not complain so loudly. Personally, I am thankful that my grandfather's PC will soon be running Vista under an account with normal permissions. Less clean-up work for me.

Tags UAC Prompt Windows Vista

posted by John Walker @ 2/22/2007 1:12:00 AM

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Vista's UAC Prompt - Is it really that bad?

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