This is the second time I’ve come across this issue due to upgrading Windows, and the usual searching isn’t terribly helpful. With UAC in recent flavors of Windows, you’re required to run Visual Studio as an administrator to debug a website using IIS. This means that when you debug, the application launches as an administrator as well. This is fine 99% of the time, except for when you want to interact with other programs that don’t run as an administrator. Most of the time, you just run the other app as an admin and you’re good to go. Unfortunately file explorer does not have this ability - which is also why dragging and dropping files into Visual Studio no longer works.
You have two options for this. The first is to close the instance of Visual Studio which is running as an admin, and restart it without using Run As Administrator. This first way is by far the easiest fix, but it isn’t always an option. The second way is to completely turn off UAC. The option from the settings charm/control panel is really a “how annoying do you want me to be” meter and doesn’t even come close to killing it, so you have to do it in the registry. Run regedit, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System, set EnableLUA to 0, and reboot. This will likely cause issues elsewhere, so you will probably want to turn it back on once you’ve completed debugging.
Sources:
Disabling User Access Control in Windows 8
Why my WPF application has Drag & Drop disabled
Just to warn, this is a bit of a rant. I subscribe to MLB.TV so that my wife and I can watch Red Sox games. We don’t live anywhere near Boston, so it’s our only option. Most of the time, the service is pretty great. There’s the occasional blackout on the weekends, but it still ends up giving us 130-140 games that we would not be able to watch otherwise.
Most of the apps they provide work for the most part, but the Windows 8 app should be shown as a case study on what not to do. If you watch on a Windows RT device, it will crash constantly. On full Windows 8 device, it will crash slightly less often, but still fail frequently. The really fun part? If it crashes 3 times in a short amount of time, they have some sort of connection throttling that blocks access completely. So you get punished for their lousy app. If that isn’t enough, their authentication is poorly implemented, so you have to log in each time the app gets terminated. Which is every time on an RT device, every other time on a full Win 8 device, or after every time the app crashes. All of the scores of the other games are displayed next to the video feed, but you can’t see the score of the current game unless it’s on the streaming broadcast and you get close enough to read the tiny numbers.
I love baseball, but that app is just an embarrassment to the MLB.
In my ongoing saga with getting a Windows 8 Store app approved, I’ve been battling with a handy little tool called the CredentialPicker. Handy at first glance, anyway. It creates the Dialog layer with the standard Windows 8 appearance for logging in. One of the requirements for getting a Store app approved is that if your app requires the user to be logged in to use it, it must provide an option to register, which can be as simple as a link to register on a website. My app got rejected because I didn’t do this. Since my app is built on the Delicious API, I figured I would just find the option on the CredentialPicker for adding a link to register and get it resubmitted. A great idea in concept, until I found out that there is no such option. It seems like such an obvious ability, but no - you either use the half dozen options on the CredentialPicker or you have to completely roll your own. So a word of advice - plan ahead for how you’re going to handle this, particularly if you use a third party API that doesn’t have the ability to register in it. I sure hope this changes in future releases.
After taking the ridiculous action yesterday of cancelling the release and resubmitting it, my app went to testers and I got feedback within a day. It got rejected for two reasonable and legitimate reasons, which I’ll fix and resubmit shortly. I’m still a bit bummed that it seems you have to “hack” the app submission process, but I’m glad things seems to be moving forward. Finally.