Checking Elevated Status at run time

Question

0.00/5 (No votes)

See more:

Hello everyone,

Earlier I attached a manifest file to my legacy program prompting UAC elevation on the start up of a program. While the UAC does prompt upon program start up, I am currently unable to get the section of my program requiring administrator status to properly output on computers separate from my own.

To properly debug this, I need to make sure that when I transfer this app to other computers, they are in fact also running my program with elevated administrator settings.

My question is this:
Is there a relatively simple way to, at run time, determine whether or not a program is running with elevated administrator settings?

If I can perform this check on another computer and it turns out that it is running with administrator status, I'll be able to confirm that the issue is with my code and not my method of prompting the UAC for elevation. I will also note that I am working with Windows 7.

Thanks for reading this! Let me know if anything is unclear about my request.

Posted 31-Oct-12 8:12am

Parwarrior7

Updated 31-Oct-12 8:14am

v2

Add a Solution

1 solution

Add a Solution

Add your solution here

Treat my content as plain text, not as HTML

Preview 0

…

Existing Members

Sign in to your account

...or Join us

Download, Vote, Comment, Publish.

Your Email
Password
Forgot your password?

Your Email
This email is in use. Do you need your password?
Optional Password

I have read and agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
Please subscribe me to the CodeProject newsletters

When answering a question please:

Read the question carefully.
Understand that English isn't everyone's first language so be lenient of bad spelling and grammar.
If a question is poorly phrased then either ask for clarification, ignore it, or edit the question and fix the problem. Insults are not welcome.
Don't tell someone to read the manual. Chances are they have and don't get it. Provide an answer or move on to the next question.

Let's work to help developers, not make them feel stupid.

This content, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-31T10:42:00

The solution can be found there:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/95912/how-can-i-detect-if-my-process-is-running-uac-elevated-or-not[^].

[EDIT]

This is not the same as checking IsUserAnAdmin:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb776463%28v=vs.85%29.aspx[^].

This API merely checks up if the user is in the Administrator's group. This is not what you need: to get elevated privileges, the user does not have to be in this group, and the privileges can be denied (via UAC) is the user is a member of this group.

I think this API was only useful for OS before Vista and Windows Server 2008 when UAC was introduced. For more information, please see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_Control[^].

[END EDIT]

However, if you properly devise your manifest, you don't really need to check it up. You can consider the functionality you need is already built in UAC in the following sense: if the user can get a requested privilege and confirm in the UAC confirmation dialog which appears automatically, the application will be executed, always with elevated privileges; in all other cases, if cannot be executed at all. I think if this functionality can be enough for your purpose, it's always better.

If do understand that in certain cases you really need to check up the elevation in the application code. One simple example is: if it is granted the elevated privileges, you show full set of operations, if not, you hide or, better, disable some items from its UI. I just don't see where you would need it in your case. You know better, of course.

—SA