Microsoft commited to "Standard User"

This week Microsoft furthered its commitment to the Standard User desktop by releasing the Standard User Analyzer. This tool is designed primarily for developers to help them understand when their applications are using Administrator privileges. Chris Corio, one of the UAC Program Managers, announced the release at WinHEC.

CNet covered the release here:

http://news.com.com/Tool+helps+programs+befriend+Vista/2100-1012_3-6076594.html

Wei Wang also provides some details about Standard User Analyzer (SUA) at the UAC Blog, He says

“SUA is a runtime diagnose tool and has two modes, predictive mode and diagnose mode.  In predictive mode, the application being tested is launched elevated with administrative privileges.  SUA works by monitoring a set of selected APIs that are used to access resources, like files and registry keys, on the operating system.  During application runtime, SUA interprets how each API is called, monitors the result, and logs the result on whether such a call will succeed or fail when the application is running as standard user instead of as administrator.  This allows the application to be fully exercised to provide a high level summary of all the potential standard user issues in the application.  In diagnose mode, the application being tested is launch with a standard user token.  The application may fail at the first error it encounters.  This mode is useful if you want to test the application in a standard user environment after you have fixed all the issues identified by SUA in the predictive mode.”

 

A previous tool used by many enterprises trying to evaluate applications that might have a problem as a  “Standard User”(Non-admin) is called the LUA Predictor, which is part of the Application Compatibility tool kit. This utility would, in my testing, throw many false positives related to system functions.  Hopefully Microsoft has adopted the  leanings from the LUA predictor for this utility.

This tool is currently a Beta and Microsoft will be adding new features to it as time permits. Has anyone tried this tool out? How accurate was it for you? What would you change? Let us know your thoughts as a comment here and we’ll try to get the Microsoft UAC team to comment.