MobMap development blog

Okay, so I'm sorry for throwing out so many updates right now, but I just had a flash of inspiration concerning the problematic situation described in the last posting.

The problem: The updater cannot update anything when started without admin rights in that particular situation. It also cannot change its access level after it has been started (requesting admin rights is only possible when a new process is being created, not while it is running).

The solution: Why not start another instance of the updater and force Windows to request admin privileges for this new instance? The new instance will then have admin rights, and the old one is immediately terminated. If you don't know what's actually happening, this looks like the updater requesting admin rights during startup - and it only requests those if the problematic situation requires them!

The newest version 1.84 does exactly that. Thus it will look like the old 1.81 on any machine where admin rights are required to update addons, but it won't request them on any machine where they are not required. If this works out without any bugs now, it's the perfect solution!

That UAC stuff on Vista is definitely inconvenient for us developers...

But I think the MobMapUpdater is now fully ready to be run without administrative rights on Vista with activated UAC functionalities. The self-update process will now correctly request administrative rights if there is a self-update to perform.

If you were unfortunate enough to get the 1.82 version with the self-update bug during the few minutes that it was online, the self-update to 1.83 might not work if UAC is enabled. In this case, you can manually start "selfupdate.exe" to get the new version.


Please note that - as an inconvenient, but inevitable side-effect - the MobMapUpdater might sort of "break" in some installations now. If...

- The WoW directory is located within the "Program Files" folder...
- Vista with UAC enabled is used...
- ...and the MobMapUpdater is being run without administrative rights (which is the default now)

then the MobMapUpdater won't be able to update anything - neither your MobMap installation nor your database, as both of them reside in the WoW directory which is protected by UAC in this case. The updater is designed to detect such a situation, flash a warning on-screen that explains what the problem is and then terminate itself, since it can't do anything useful anyway. In that case you have two options:

- You could move your WoW installation out of the "Program Files" folder. If it is moved anywhere else, UAC won't stop the MobMapUpdater from updating MobMap or its database. Only the "Program Files" folder (and the "Windows" folder, but no one in their right mind would put WoW into that one) is protected.
- Or you could manually enable "run as administrator" in the parameters of the MobMapUpdater.exe executable. That will force Windows to always start the updater with full administrative rights (of course that will bring back the UAC confirmation request at every program startup), which also enables the tool to actually update MobMap.