If You Cannot Load Projects in Visual Studio 2010 using IIS

If you are running Visual Studio 2010 on Vista and using IIS to host your development projects, you probably need to run Visual Studio as an Administrator for VS to have access to load the project. How do you know? You’ll probably see “unavailable” next to the project name as shown in the screenshot below.

You can fix it by right clicking the Visual Studio launch icon from your Start menu and clicking “Run as administrator”, but that is a one time use action.

If instead you click on “Properties”, then select “Advanced” you can check the “Run as administrator” box and Visual Studio will always launch with Administrator privileges when you launch VS from that Start menu link.

This is the same operation that was necessary with some older versions of Visual Studio.