UAC and administrator prompt

Hi,

My name jo, from Portugal, and i've found wyBuild during a research to find a solution that could handle deployment and update of my company's software... i found yours, me like... but me stuck when it comes to win7 and UAC. Question is if there is any way to workaround it (or if you are implementing it), in order not to ask for an administrator password.this being the only obstacle to use wyBuild in my working field.

thanks in advance and for the excellent software you provide.Jo Noronha

Hi Jo,

Question is if there is any way to workaround it (or if you are implementing it), in order not to ask for an administrator password.

It depends. If all your users are currently running as administrator, then yes - the admin password won't be required (but the UAC prompt would still show). But since you're asking this question, I would guess this is not the case.

So the answer is no. There's no way to get around UAC. The only solutions I can think of is to give your users admin control over their computers, or manually log-in to all the computer in your company and run wyUpdate.

I guessed as much, but i had to ask 🙁

the reason for asking is because I know of several software companies that do that, they use a service for that, installed as an administrator and running at startup.I was hopping you had something similar to this or in the process of develop it.

Anyway, your software still is a great software... thanks,Jo Noronha

I was hopping you had something similar to this or in the process of develop it.

We are developing a version of wyUpdate that installs itself as a service and installs without prompt (much like Windows Update). However, this is still at least a year away.

Hi Wyatt, have you finished the version of wyUpdate that runs as a service yet?

Hi All,

I wish to add my two pence to this discussion.

Jo Noronha look at the way Google Chrome installs, see it never asks for UAC permissions, that's because it installs to the users folder. I'm not sure if you can install to the all users folder without UAC permissions.

But Im seriously considering taking my app out of program files and into Users AppData folder.

Anyone else have something to say on this?

Hey Wayne,

You can update Windows Services completely silently -- no user prompt at all -- in either .NET or any other language (C, C++, Delphi, Java, etc.):

As far as updating GUI apps (i.e. apps that the user already interacts with) without an admin prompt when it's needed, we won't be adding that to wyUpdate. Although it is possible, we don't want to subvert the user access layers built into Windows. This leaves you with a couple of choices:

  1. Install your app to the %appdata% folder for the user. wyUpdate will have access to all the user files & registry, and thus it won't show any UAC or admin prompts.
  2. Create your own "LocalSystem" service that does the updating using either wyUpdate.exe or the AutomaticUpdater.

We recommend you choose option 1.

Just saw David's (installhunter) post. Chrome uses option 1 (i.e. installing to %appdata%), and really this is the best option if you want no admin prompts.

Wyatt, great minds think a like 😀

Thanks Wyatt.

I was thinking of doing the last option, which is to build my own service that runs as LocalSystem and then uses wyUpdate to check for updates for all of the desktop apps that my user has installed. However, it would have to install updates completely silently since you can't easily show a UI from a LocalSystem service. Either that or I'd have to use some kind of IPC (named pipes) to let a GUI talk to the service. Something to think about.

1) Does anyone know if its ok to install\update files to\in the *AllUsers* AppData folder without UAC permissions?2) If UAC is not required, would it work in versions XP-7

1) Does anyone know if its ok to install\update files to\in the *AllUsers* AppData folder without UAC permissions?

It works, and wyUpdate will update your app without asking for elevation, if that's what you mean by "OK". We don't recommend it for several security reasons. One such reason is that a virus could be written to target your app specifically, in which case they wouldn't need to work around the UAC or admin permissions, they could just modify your app silently.

Obviously this is an extreme case, but it's something to consider.

2) If UAC is not required, would it work in versions XP-7

If you install to the %appdata% folder on Windows 2000 - Windows 7+ (and you don't modify any system files, registry, or services) then wyUpdate will update without prompting the user. wyUpdate always checks whether it needs extra admin permission to update and only asks for it when it's absolutely essential.

Short answer: yes.

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