Calling all non-admin SharePoint developers... uh, help?

I try to be a good citizen, I really try. I tried to take the plunge today to create a non-admin user account to do SharePoint development. Yes, I’m the evil MVP that for the last few years has been running as, gasp, Administrator. I found that when I do a run-as command and launch Internet Exploder, some sites don’t render propertly. They’re fine if I log on as the user but not if I do a run-as.

Anyways, I figured it was about time I stopped using the God account and tried the least-user privledge approach on my Windows 2003 Server (I’m sure my place on the respecto-meter will go up with Dan on this). So I created a new regular Joe User account and started tweaking things to make sure I wasn’t able to be uber-admin guy accidently.

All is fine and well and I can build Web Parts, deploy, etc. but I’m screwed for debugging. I’ve added the account to the following groups: Debugger Users, IIS_WPG, and VS Developers. This is the standard thing everyone tells you to do (IIS_WPG is for SharePoint, otherwise the other two will work for regular VS development). When I launch the debugger in VS2003, I get the infamous dialog:

What’s a girl to do. I’ve tried every suggestion I’ve seen out there but the dialog is pretty un-informative. Any tools out there that I can use to see what right the system is trying to do so I can set it up? Note that the dialog says “Access is denied” but I have no idea what access it’s referring to. Kinda sucks so I’m temporarily flipping back to my Administrator account until I can get this to work.

Like I said, everything works fine except for debugging (which if I had complete coverage on my tests I probably wouldn’t need to debug, but that’s another blog).

Note: I’ve tried the following pages and suggestions so please don’t tell me to visit these as they don’t work in my case (for SharePoint development, even Angus’ post)

Note: My favorite tool, SharePoint Explorer, seems to be hard coded to only run for a local admin. Any ideas on this issue as well? There are some solutions out there (MakeMeAdmin is one) but it seems SharePoint Explorer really needs the user to be the local admin and not just an elevated user. Pity.

2 Comments

  • I recently (within the last 2 weeks) had the same issue. I looked high and low for a solution but never found one. I had to jump on other tasks and it got lower priority when another dev said that all of a sudden it began working again. If I find out any more details, I'll pass along but I also searched high and low for an answer to no avail. I reinstalled the .NET framework several times, tried every group membership permission known to man, and tried attaching processes to no avail.

  • Hi, I had the same problem aswell. No solution found either. The easiest, quick&dirty method is to move all development to the server. I did however manage to bypass your message, only to be greeted another one stating "The RD service was not able to connect to your local computer" or something like that.

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