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A customer of ours faced a very interesting issue we were able to solve earlier today.

 

The problem was that when Visual Studio run under the context of his account, all the Telerik VSExtensions were available in the Extension Manager. On the other hand, when Visual Studio run as a different user, the Telerik WebUI VSExtensions were missing.

 

The problem is very likely to happen if you run Visual Studio under different accounts to test your applications with limited permissions. It happens when you usually install the Telerik VSExtensions through the installer and you decide to install a newer version through the Extension Manager:

Telerik VSExtensions In ExtensionManager

 

The reason is that the RadControls installers deploy the VSExtensions “as admin”, e.g. the extensions get unpacked under the [VisualStudioInstallDir]\Common7\IDE\Extensions folder (typically C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Common7\IDE\Extensions) and the Extension Manager unpacks them under the %localappdata%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Extensions one.

 

It is important to note here that the VSIX packages of the Telerik VSExtensions for Visual Studio 2010 are equally the same: we get the packages and upload them to the Visual Studio Online Gallery after the build. The difference is only in the execution of the VSIXInstaller (the tool, responsible for the unpacking of a VSIX package).

 

While the RadControls installers use the /a switch, double-clicking a VSIX file or downloading through the Extension Manager does not use that switch. Unfortunately the UI of the VSIXInstaller does not provide a checkbox for an installation to be run “as admin”, so you would have to use the Visual Studio 2010 Command-line to avoid the above mentioned problem. Here is the command to execute:

 

VSIXInstaller /a Telerik.Web.UI.VSPackage.vsix

 

HINT: If you’ve already hit the problem, there are two approaches:

  1. The harder one is to uninstall the VSIX packages you have installed under your user and run them as an administrative install
  2. The easier one (thanks to the XCOPY deployment nature of the VS2010 Extensions) is to use Windows Explorer to copy the files in the %localappdata%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0\Extensions\Telerik folder to the [VisualStudioInstallDir]\Common7\IDE\Extensions\Telerik one.

Hope this helps.

P.S. Thanks Martin for sharing your machine and helping clear the things out!


About the Author

Erjan Gavalji

 is Software Developer in Telerik

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