Monday 10 November 2014

Launching Windows applications in Parallels from OSX without UAC prompts

TL;DR; 

Use a scheduled task to avoid UAC prompts in Windows; create a shortcut to the scheduled task; use a shell script to tell Parallels to use Windows Explorer to open the shortcut.

Details ... 

As a .Net developer using an OSX machine I'm a big fan of Parallels Desktop. I'm also a big fan of not taking my hands off the keyboard as I find that using a trackpad or mouse gives me some pain in the back of my hand and wrist. One way I help myself with this is by not using the mouse to launch applications. In both Windows and OSX this is relatively straightforward, but in Windows two of the applications I use a lot I really need to use with admin privileges (the console/command line and Visual Studio). The best way I've found to avoid doing extra mouse work (or just extra key presses) is to use a Scheduled Task in Windows and create a shortcut to it. Details of how to do this here: http://www.7tutorials.com/use-task-scheduler-launch-programs-without-uac-prompts

Great, so now I don't have to say "yes, please let me run this application as an administrator" every time I want to use Visual Studio. But I want more. I want a single way of launching applications on Windows and OSX.

Step forward QuickSilver - free and awesome. It used to be the case that I could just double-click on my Windows Shortcut (.lnk) files to launch the applications in OSX, so I kept them in my Quick Silver catalog and just used QuickSilver in the normal way, but recently this stopped working.

Double clicking on the shortcut in Windows still worked, double-clicking or right-clicking and selecting 'Open with' either 'Parallels Link' or 'Windows Explorer' didn't work either.

I never worked out what had changed (Windows? Parallels? Sun spot activity?) but I did find a solution. I now have a bunch of shell-scripts that look like this:
Which means that I can easily launch the applications I use most, without UAC prompts, from OSX.