UAC is a developers friend?

Maybe - I haven't decided yet, but Shawn Oster and Jack Brewster made some comments on my previous post that got me thinking... maybe it's really a good thing.

Jack points out that most organizations have very locked down environments.  Within his own job, he's run into applications that don't work without some sort of elevated privilege (and knowing Jack, probably some good stories about dealing with them) and that his organization will start dumping apps that need special attention to run.

As RSS and RSS Readers become more popular within enterprises, this becomes extremely important.  No IT department is going to sign off on software that requires them to, as Jack puts it, "hack folder or registry permissions" in order to deploy to thousands of users.  They'll simply pass.

Shawn says that "Windows developers got very, very lazy in always assuming every user had full admin rights and now we're paying for it."  I agree - and admit that I have fallen into this trap as well. 

The first private beta of Inbox 3.0 had code that wrote a temporary file into the same directory it was executing from.  That's bad!  Multiple user machines share that directory - but I didn't take that into account.  Only till a beta tester using UAC ran into issues did I notice my mistake (and change the code to write to the proper place within the users %localappdata% where my other user specific files are written).

A long time ago I had written a piece of code that attempted to change a registry key under LOCAL_MACHINE.  Again, bad!  In that case, we got a support email from Larry Osterman, a guy who knows a thing or two about Windows, pointing it out.

In both cases, developing while using UAC as Shawn suggests, would have caught these bad practices before the code ever left my own box - and saved me two support emails and two frustrated users.  So that's what I'm going to do from now on.