Where to post question?

Question

I have a question, but I am not sure where to post it, it's either here (serverfault, superuser or overflow) and I would like to post in the correct place.

I will appreciate your assistance (before it gets deleted from the wrong forum).

Subject: How Can I have my developers NOT be admins on their own machine?

Text: As part of good practice, I want that the developers in my company/domain will NOT have admin rights on their own/development computers. Trying to just have them a member of the Local Users group - causes compilation errors while trying to sign their code, and/or edit registry settings, and/or regsvr dll's.

Is there a way to make that happen?

• we tried the option to: Run As Administrator - but it seems that VS 2010 did not actually run as such.

TAGS: VS 2010, Domain Users, Developemnt? , Security?

Answer 1

First, If it's a good question we will migrate it to the correct place. It will only be closed if it's a poor question. We do not delete questions (unless it's not even vaguely a question).

It's pretty common for Devs to be Admins of their own computers for the reasons you've listed. See the related questions:

• Should dev be admin on their computer?
• Is locking down a developers machine more effort than its worth?
• How to assign enough perms to a dev without full Admin rights
• Windows Permissions for Developers?

Also, on Programmers.SO:

• https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/62207/windows-permissions-for-developers
• https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/4596/is-local-user-rights-enough-or-do-developers-need-local-administrator-or-power

There's also quite a bit of discussion about the Devs not being Admins over their Workstation, but are Admins over VMs they can run on their workstation or on a development server/cluster. This allows a level of abstraction where the Devs aren't admins over any physical boxes, but have rights over the more easily managed (aka Wiped/Reinstalled) VMs to do their development dirty work.

Answer 2

On SF such a question would get closed as a duplicate of one of the others that asks the same thing and a quick search should (the Stack Exchange search functionality leaves a lot to be desired, so try Google instead) have led you to at least one of those questions.

As for the question itself, have a read of the answers already posted on the topic. Then, if you're still not convinced that devs really do require admin rights on Windows machines, have a go it playing dev for a day.

In regard to what tags such a question might have, you need to consider that it's a question of access rights, so none of those you listed would be appropriate.