C# – Request Windows Vista UAC elevation if path is protected

Whereas one approach is to implement the ICloneable interface (described here, so I won't regurgitate), here's a nice deep clone object copier I found on The Code Project a while ago and incorporated it into our code. As mentioned elsewhere, it requires your objects to be serializable.

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Runtime.Serialization;
using System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary;

/// <summary>
/// Reference Article http://www.codeproject.com/KB/tips/SerializedObjectCloner.aspx
/// Provides a method for performing a deep copy of an object.
/// Binary Serialization is used to perform the copy.
/// </summary>
public static class ObjectCopier
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Perform a deep copy of the object via serialization.
    /// </summary>
    /// <typeparam name="T">The type of object being copied.</typeparam>
    /// <param name="source">The object instance to copy.</param>
    /// <returns>A deep copy of the object.</returns>
    public static T Clone<T>(T source)
    {
        if (!typeof(T).IsSerializable)
        {
            throw new ArgumentException("The type must be serializable.", nameof(source));
        }

        // Don't serialize a null object, simply return the default for that object
        if (ReferenceEquals(source, null)) return default;

        using var Stream stream = new MemoryStream();
        IFormatter formatter = new BinaryFormatter();
        formatter.Serialize(stream, source);
        stream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
        return (T)formatter.Deserialize(stream);
    }
}

The idea is that it serializes your object and then deserializes it into a fresh object. The benefit is that you don't have to concern yourself about cloning everything when an object gets too complex.

In case of you prefer to use the new extension methods of C# 3.0, change the method to have the following signature:

public static T Clone<T>(this T source)
{
   // ...
}

Now the method call simply becomes objectBeingCloned.Clone();.

EDIT (January 10 2015) Thought I'd revisit this, to mention I recently started using (Newtonsoft) Json to do this, it should be lighter, and avoids the overhead of [Serializable] tags. (NB @atconway has pointed out in the comments that private members are not cloned using the JSON method)

/// <summary>
/// Perform a deep Copy of the object, using Json as a serialization method. NOTE: Private members are not cloned using this method.
/// </summary>
/// <typeparam name="T">The type of object being copied.</typeparam>
/// <param name="source">The object instance to copy.</param>
/// <returns>The copied object.</returns>
public static T CloneJson<T>(this T source)
{            
    // Don't serialize a null object, simply return the default for that object
    if (ReferenceEquals(source, null)) return default;

    // initialize inner objects individually
    // for example in default constructor some list property initialized with some values,
    // but in 'source' these items are cleaned -
    // without ObjectCreationHandling.Replace default constructor values will be added to result
    var deserializeSettings = new JsonSerializerSettings {ObjectCreationHandling = ObjectCreationHandling.Replace};

    return JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<T>(JsonConvert.SerializeObject(source), deserializeSettings);
}

As of 2017, an easy method to achieve this is the following:

import ctypes, sys

def is_admin():
    try:
        return ctypes.windll.shell32.IsUserAnAdmin()
    except:
        return False

if is_admin():
    # Code of your program here
else:
    # Re-run the program with admin rights
    ctypes.windll.shell32.ShellExecuteW(None, "runas", sys.executable, " ".join(sys.argv), None, 1)

If you are using Python 2.x, then you should replace the last line for:

ctypes.windll.shell32.ShellExecuteW(None, u"runas", unicode(sys.executable), unicode(" ".join(sys.argv)), None, 1)

Also note that if you converted you python script into an executable file (using tools like py2exe, cx_freeze, pyinstaller) then you should use sys.argv[1:] instead of sys.argv in the fourth parameter.

Some of the advantages here are:

• No external libraries required. It only uses ctypes and sys from standard library.
• Works on both Python 2 and Python 3.
• There is no need to modify the file resources nor creating a manifest file.
• If you don't add code below if/else statement, the code won't ever be executed twice.
• You can get the return value of the API call in the last line and take an action if it fails (code <= 32). Check possible return values here.
• You can change the display method of the spawned process modifying the sixth parameter.

Documentation for the underlying ShellExecute call is here.