The Moth

Anyone running on Vista knows about the new security feature of UAC. A known trick is to right click on a command window shortcut and select "Run As Administrator" to get an elevated command window.


Following that, anything you launch from the elevated cmd will also be elevated. Of course this can be dangerous so when a command window is elevated, it is prefixed with the word "Administrator" (so you can distinguish it from non-elevated command windows).


No other window on Vista will tell you in its caption that it is running as administrator. The reason for that is that you will not typically run an interactive process elevated for a long period of time plus most apps cannot do the accidental damage that an elevated cmd window can. Of course each application developer can decide for their own app what they want to do.

The VS Orcas team decided that they wanted to differentiate an elevated VS instance from a non-elevated instance. They do this by appending a "(Administrator)" string on the title as the following screenshot shows:


I like this, although I would have also liked some consistency between cmd and VS and in fact maybe some official Windows guideline that all apps follow.