Testing install procedure of a program requiring administrative privileges
- by Lucas Meijer
I'm trying to write automated test, to ensure that the installer for my program works okay.
The program can be installed for all users (requires admin privs), or for current user (does not require admin privs). The program can also autoupdate itself, which in some cases requires admin privileges, and in some cases doesn't.
I'm looking for a way where I can have an automated test click "Yes, Allow" on the UAC dialogs, so I can write tests for all different scenarios, on many different operating systems, so that I can be confident when I make changes to the installer that I didn't break anything.
Obviously, the installer process itself cannot do this. However, I control the complete machine, and could easily start some sort of daemon process with administrative rights, that the testprogram could make a socket connection to, to request it to "please click ok on the UAC now".