Hi gang,
I lurk and sometimes post in the GRC newsgroups, but when something related to coding practices came up I couldn't think of a better place to start looking for answers than the folks here. Paul H and Barry W suggested I post here. Hi guys!
Some of my extended family through marriage own, operate, and perform at a live music venue. The question I have is about their ticketing system.
The system, used to handle all aspects of reserving seats, buying, and printing tickets for both individuals and groups, is old. It was originally born at least 25 years ago iiuc, but the guy who wrote it still maintains it, tinkers with it, and adds new custom features upon request. Although it looks and feels like an older app, still runs just fine on modern Windows machines, with one very big caveat: it requires administrator permissions to launch.
The developer is one of those guys that seems to find fault with everything Microsoft does, particularly with the inconveniences related to tightening up security. He'd rather complain than try to understand the reasons behind their decisions. While I agree that Microsoft still gives us plenty of reasons to fault them, taking actions to make their OS and their users safer and more secure is clearly the right call. Not needing to be an admin to run normal programs has been the accepted conventional wisdom for quite some time now.
Over the years whenever I've had occasion to work with him on something, I've consistently urged him to update his system so that users don't need to be administrators to run it. The problem is, I'm not a developer. And in talking to him, it's recently become clear that he himself has no idea why his application asks for administrator permissions.
The application is written in Visual Fox Pro, which most here probably know has been unsupported for years now. Since I'm not a coder, I have NO idea what advice to give him or what resources I could direct him to to help him figure out how to update his system so that it no longer requires admin rights. What feature or process or method within his application is responsible for triggering the request for administrator permissions? He has no idea, and I have no real idea how to help him.
The system architecture is pretty simple. He has no installer. To set up a new workstation, there's a collection of files that you copy to a folder in the root of the C: drive; C:\Tickets is the path. Then you give users a shortcut to a particular executable within that folder. There's a shared folder on a local server with a bunch more files which the client-side files communicate, which presumably includes a Visual Fox Pro database of some kind.
I've had a number of ideas on things to try, but his system makes many assumptions about the locations of files, so all of them require him to make multiple changes to his system in order to test:
I know that was a long post, so thanks for reading. All thoughts welcome!
- Bryan
I lurk and sometimes post in the GRC newsgroups, but when something related to coding practices came up I couldn't think of a better place to start looking for answers than the folks here. Paul H and Barry W suggested I post here. Hi guys!
Some of my extended family through marriage own, operate, and perform at a live music venue. The question I have is about their ticketing system.
The system, used to handle all aspects of reserving seats, buying, and printing tickets for both individuals and groups, is old. It was originally born at least 25 years ago iiuc, but the guy who wrote it still maintains it, tinkers with it, and adds new custom features upon request. Although it looks and feels like an older app, still runs just fine on modern Windows machines, with one very big caveat: it requires administrator permissions to launch.
The developer is one of those guys that seems to find fault with everything Microsoft does, particularly with the inconveniences related to tightening up security. He'd rather complain than try to understand the reasons behind their decisions. While I agree that Microsoft still gives us plenty of reasons to fault them, taking actions to make their OS and their users safer and more secure is clearly the right call. Not needing to be an admin to run normal programs has been the accepted conventional wisdom for quite some time now.
Over the years whenever I've had occasion to work with him on something, I've consistently urged him to update his system so that users don't need to be administrators to run it. The problem is, I'm not a developer. And in talking to him, it's recently become clear that he himself has no idea why his application asks for administrator permissions.
The application is written in Visual Fox Pro, which most here probably know has been unsupported for years now. Since I'm not a coder, I have NO idea what advice to give him or what resources I could direct him to to help him figure out how to update his system so that it no longer requires admin rights. What feature or process or method within his application is responsible for triggering the request for administrator permissions? He has no idea, and I have no real idea how to help him.
The system architecture is pretty simple. He has no installer. To set up a new workstation, there's a collection of files that you copy to a folder in the root of the C: drive; C:\Tickets is the path. Then you give users a shortcut to a particular executable within that folder. There's a shared folder on a local server with a bunch more files which the client-side files communicate, which presumably includes a Visual Fox Pro database of some kind.
I've had a number of ideas on things to try, but his system makes many assumptions about the locations of files, so all of them require him to make multiple changes to his system in order to test:
- What if the application is run from within Program Files (x86)? I think that's probably important. Would Admin rights still be requested?
- What if he packages the application into an installer, so we're not just copying files to a folder to deploy? Does that have any bearing?
- Is he using methods or processes that have been deprecated instead of newer APIs or Windows features that have been rearchitected specifically to remove the Admin requirement? If so, how does he identify them and update them?
- Are there tools designed specifically to help developers solve this problem?
- Even if there are such tools, is VFP simply too old to be capable of operating without admin rights in a modern Windows environment?
I know that was a long post, so thanks for reading. All thoughts welcome!
- Bryan
