Drag and Drop files in Windows 7 with User Account Control (UAC) enabled causes issues.

I took the plunge and updated to Windows 7 x64 on my development machine. It has been a fairly pleasant experience for the most part. No major problems with installation, setup, drivers, or getting my development environment configured correctly so that I can get back to working!

I’ve been enjoying Windows 7 so much that I decided to leave the User Account Control (UAC) active. The implementation seems to be MUCH less annoying in Windows 7 than it was in Windows Vista. You even have access to options to configure just how annoying (err, I mean secure) you want it to be.

Unfortunately, I found a deal-breaker that finally led me to disable the UAC in Windows 7. The problem started out when I was unable to drag an aspx file from my Windows Explorer window into my Visual Studio window like I’ve always done. I ended up figuring out the problem. I had the “Run as Administrator” option set for my instance of Visual Studio 2008 while my Windows Explorer was running with default permissions for my User Account. >_<

UAC is trying to protect me from processes running with lesser privileges from sending messages to processes running with Administrator privileges. Probably a valid concern, but considering that I generally NEED to run my Visual Studio as an Administrator and I really like the ability to drag an drop files into it… UAC has gone the way of the Dodo once more (at least on my machine.) I also ran into this issue when trying to drag files into my SQL Server 2008 Management Studio. This one isn’t as critical since it really doesn’t need to be run as Administrator, but annoying just the same.

Hope this might help someone else figure out why Dragging and Dropping between processes no longer works for them in some instances!

~ Paul