In order to debug processes in Visual Studio, I need to be running it in administrator. This morning I had to close Visual Studio to reopen it in administrator mode for the last time. I went searching for how to avoid this problem in the future.

One solution is to always run your application in administrator mode. This process needs to be set up for each application you want to run in this way, but the steps are fairly trivial:

1. Find the application in the start menu, right click, and select Open File Location¹

   

2. Right click on the shortcut and click Properties

   

3. Select Advanced on the Shortcut tab

   

4. Check the Run as administrator box and save

   

That’s it! Now the application will always run in administrator mode. You’ll still get the pop up confirming you want it to run in administrator mode, but you won’t have to worry about forgetting to manually select that you want it to run with elevated privileges.

Credit to CNET for the how-to.

Footnotes

• ¹ This doesn’t seem to work for all applications. Windows Terminal for example doesn’t have a Open File Location menu item, though there are ways to run in administrator mode, including modifying a user profile to always run as administrator.