Many tasks in Visual Studio can be accomplished using standard security settings. To open a solution with Visual Studio 2010 SP1, just double-click the .sln solution file. There are a number of situations where you may want VS to run as an administrator, for example when your .NET objects are being registered as COM components. ActiveX registrations only work in elevated mode.

There is an easy solution for running VS always as an administrator, I thought. Just change the file properties and off you go. Well... to keep it short and ignore a couple of hours I spent on this - it didn't work and the solution to this turns out to be much more complicated.

The reason for this is the Visual Studio version selector, a little tool that is run each time you try to open a .sln file. It inspects the .sln file to find out which version of Visual Studio is to be started if you have several versions installed in parallel on your machine.

Fabian from www.re-motion.org wrote a good blog article about this and explains how to fix this problem. I'd like to share this with you as I am sure it will be of help:

https://www.re-motion.org/blogs/mix/2011/05/03/getting-visual-studio-2010-sp1-to-run-elevated-when-launching/