Tip/Trick: Avoid launching 2 instances of IE when using Visual Studio 2005 on Windows Vista

I've seen user reports in several forums, where two instances of Internet Explorer get launched when doing F5, CTRL+F5, or View in Browser in Visual Studio 2005 running on Windows Vista.

If you are encountering this issue, taking the following two steps should fix it:

1. Install the beta version of the Visual Studio 2005 Update for Windows Vista.  The final version of this update is planned to ship very soon, I will post an update to this blog when its available.
2. Run Visual Studio 2005 with elevated administrative rights.  Even if you are a member of the "Administrators" group on the local machine, applications launched in Vista do not run with elevated administrative rights unless the user explicitly specifies to do so.  To use Visual Studio 2005 with elevated administrator rights on Windows Vista, you must right-click on the Visual Studio 2005 icon and select the "Run as administrator" command as shown below:

However, as you will soon realize, its very easy to forget to do this everytime you start Visual Studio 2005.  Luckily, there is a handy way in Windows Vista to always force Visual Studio 2005 to start with elevated administrative rights.  The following steps describe how to set this up:

1. Right click on Visual Studio 2005 shortcut in the Start Menu and select Properties:

  

2. On the Compatability tab choose "Show settings for all users" button:

3. In the dialog that is launched, check the "Run this program as an administrator" item:

For those Visual Studio web developers out there using Windows Vista this tip should make the experience mostly pain-free!

Cheers,

-- Omar Khan (Group Program Manager, WebTools Team)