Are there functionality limitations to using the Microsoft .NET framework and Visual Studio if you do not have administrator access to the box they are installed on? If there aren't, what needs to be configured to have full functionality? I hope this doesn't result in some lengthy answer. If you think it is, let me know in the comments so I can post in a different place and delete my question.
We currently use Visual Studio 2010, but we will be moving to Visual Studio 2012 soon.
If Visual Studio runs as an Administrator, there are not any limitations. But this is dangerous because it has access to the entire operating system.
When installing Visual Studio with non admin rights, Visual Studio will run as the application pool identity with minimal rights. This security group needs to be added to a folder in Windows in order to give the IDE rights to access it.
If Visual Studio needs to access IIS, it will not have enough rights as a non admin. At the time, I wrote an application that sits between Visual Studio and Windows. It used .NET code to interact with IIS because our company did not allow anyone to use administrator rights. This way a developer could develop a localhost application before moving it to testing with our continuous integration. Basically I had a Windows Forms application that communicated with a Windows service that I developed. The Windows service had admin rights and changed the settings. The client to the Windows service was using the local user and sent TCP messages to the Windows service. My company allowed this.