Warning dialog appears when launching Visual Studio 2005 SP1 on Windows Vista

  • Article

As I'm sure many of you have noticed, Visual Studio 2005 SP1 was made available via Microsoft Update as a recommended update starting sometime last week.  I have opted my Windows Vista systems in to receive updates from Microsoft Update (by clicking the link at the bottom of the Windows Update control panel in Windows Vista and then accepting the license agreement on the Microsoft Update web site), and my Windows Vista systems are configured to automatically download and install critical and recommended updates.  As a result, I came into work on Monday and noticed that my systems now had Visual Studio 2005 SP1 installed.

When I launched the IDE for Visual Studio 2005 and/or the Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions on my Windows Vista system for the first time after installing VS 2005 SP1, I noticed a new dialog that started appearing.  It contains the following text:

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 requires the 2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista and to be run with administrative permissions.

This dialog looks like the following:

The link in this dialog points to the Visual Studio on Windows Vista topic on MSDN.  Unfortunately, as of the time I am writing this blog post, the 2005 SP1 Update for Windows Vista is only available in beta form (via this download link).

If you would like to prevent this dialog from appearing each time you launch Visual Studio, you can uncheck the Always show this message check box and click Continue.  Alternatively, you can set one of the following registry values if you need to automate the suppression of this dialog:

  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0
    ShowWindowsAdminDlg = 0 (REG_DWORD)
  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VBExpress\8.0
    ShowWindowsAdminDlg = 0 (REG_DWORD)
  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VCExpress\8.0
    ShowWindowsAdminDlg = 0 (REG_DWORD)
  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VCSExpress\8.0
    ShowWindowsAdminDlg = 0 (REG_DWORD)
  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VJSExpress\8.0
    ShowWindowsAdminDlg = 0 (REG_DWORD)
  • HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VWDExpress\8.0
    ShowWindowsAdminDlg = 0 (REG_DWORD)

Note that there is a different registry value that must be set for each of the Visual Studio 2005 Express Editions, but only a single that must be set for all standard and higher editions of Visual Studio 2005.

<update date="3/16/2010"> Fixed broken image link. </update>