How to determine whether application has administrator rights in C#

The System.Security.Principal namespace in C# provides essential classes for managing and accessing security-related information about the current user's context in a Windows environment.

You can easily create a method to check if the current user belongs to the Administrator role.

public static bool IsAdministrator()
{
    using (WindowsIdentity identity = WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent())
    {
        var principal = new WindowsPrincipal(identity);
        return principal.IsInRole(WindowsBuiltInRole.Administrator);
    }
}

You can use it as follows.

bool isAdmin = IsAdministrator();
        
if (isAdmin)
{
     Console.WriteLine("The application is running with administrator rights.");
}
else
{
     Console.WriteLine("The application is NOT running with administrator rights.");
}

Use the WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent() method to retrieve the identity of the current Windows user, then creates a WindowsPrincipal object using the current user's identity.

Use principal.IsInRole(WindowsBuiltInRole.Administrator) to help you check whether the current user belongs to the Administrator role.

The IsAdministrator() method returns true if the application is running with administrator rights, and false otherwise.