If Visual Studio 2013 was activated using a static activation key obtained through BizSpark in 2014, will it still work after graduation date in 2017?
Never signed in to VS. Product Information says "License Product key applied".
I remember seeing an email from Microsoft somewhere in 2015 that said something like:
"If you have saved your product key before [some_date_in_2015] you will be able to continue using Visual Studio 2013 after you graduate."
Does that still apply?
The answer is simply - YES.
Confirmed first hand. It still works like it worked since the day one.
The important thing is that Visual Studio 2013 was activated using a static activation key obtained through BizSpark and activated before Microsoft changed the activation policy to login-only (around mid 2015).
There is a slight possibility that it is still possible to install VS V2013 using the old ISO installation image and activate it using a static key.
Related
I got my VS 2017 product key from my University Program, now Microsoft changed the site and I can't retrieve anymore my old product keys, but actually VS 2017 has a valid product key. I want to store it so I'm looking a way to retrieve this from my licensed VS 2017.
I found that VS 2017 doesn't store product key in registry anymore, so there is another way to find it?
I haven't found info on extracting the plaintext product key, but it's still stored in the registry, just in an encoded format. See How to change Visual Studio 2017 License Key?. You might be able to export/import the relevant registry key to your new computer.
I have answered this in Retrieve Visual Studio 2017 (Enterprise) Key from privateregistry
Depending on which version you have, you might have to change the last digit of the registry key.
I have downloaded the Visual Studio Community 2015 (free version) and I don't see when the expiration date is.
I have tried to see the expiration date at Help Menu -> About Microsoft Visual Studio and there is no expiration date there.
Is there any expiration date (I have a Microsoft account)? If yes, Where can I see it? Or until when is it?
There is and there isn't an expiration date. If you register Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition by successfully signing into Visual Studio then the product is fully unlocked with no set expiry date. If you don't sign in (or haven't entered a purchased licence key), you only have 30 day evaluation license.
You can check whether your copy of Visual Studio has is registered or not by selecting Help -> About Microsoft Studio and clicking on the "License Status" link in the upper right of the About dialog. If your product isn't registered you'll see something like this:
Visual Studio Community 2015 is free. But I got the 30 day trial expired message. After some googling figured out that I have to sign in with a Microsoft account. So I signed up with my Hotmail account and after that I was able to continue using the VS community 2015.
Here is a simple approach to sneak by that stupid blocker screen in Visual Studio after 30-days expires using Process Hacker:
Details at: https://stackoverflow.com/a/34243422/3135511
It's more of a quick 'n dirty fix than a real solution. However, it may be quicker than doing all that official login/sign up, subscribe, whatever crap Microsoft wants you to do, in order to use Visual Studio Community Version for free.
I am running VSCommunity 2015 in Win8.1 virtual machine installed inside a Parallels 11 virtual machine installed on my Mac OSX El Capitan. To my surprise and delight it installed and ran fine. I used it for 2 weeks without signing into my Microsoft account. I tried to login 6 weeks later and got the 30 day trial screen shown above.
However for me I was able to simply click on the link above shown as "Check for an updated license" and was prompted in to log in to my Microsoft account. I did so and it granted me a license successfully and was seamless. Now under License Status it displays as "This product is licensed to: ".
I guess I got lucky as I'm guessing this is how it is supposed to work.
[sidebar]:
Over the decades I've disliked most MS products but have been out of the VS IDE development tools game for awhile, and I have to say using VSComm15 has been flawless. Using it to learn C# and the IDE itself for a new contract job and it worked perfectly and has great features.
You can use "RunasDate" to solve this.
There isn't an expiration date for the community edition.
The usage section from the from the Visual Studio website clearly states:
For individuals
Any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community to create
their own free or paid apps.
For organizations
An unlimited number of users within an organization can use Visual
Studio Community for the following scenarios: in a classroom learning
environment, for academic research, or for contributing to open source
projects.
For all other usage scenarios: In non-enterprise organizations, up to
five users can use Visual Studio Community. In enterprise
organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or >$1 Million US Dollars
in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source,
academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios
described above.
In case you had enabled 2-Step verification for your Microsoft account disable it when updating the VS License using the 'Check for Updated License' option provided in the window.
I also get same issue after I repair vs2015, even I click check license online, still fail.
Correct action is:
1. Sign out
2. Check License Status, then it will pop-up login window, after login then it able to successfully get the license info.
In my case, even after sign up to Visual Studio account, I cant sign in and the license still expired.
Solution from across the internet:
Download iso version of the installer.
Then run installer, select repair. That would solve the problem for most case.
In my case, I got an iso version of ms Visual Studio 2013. Installed it and I can successfully sign in and its forever free.
Here is an instructions for the problem:
You can evaluate Visual Studio for free up to 30 days.
To Unlock Visual Studio using an online subscription
Link Microsoft account to Visual Studio 2015
I have encountered this problem:
Possible solution can be found at the link above.
This message indicates that while your subscription may still be valid, the license token Visual Studio uses to keep your subscription up to date hasn’t been refreshed and has gone stale due to one of the following reasons:
You have not used Visual Studio or have had no internet connection for an extend period of time.
You signed out of Visual Studio.
I installed Visual Studio 2013 Professional as a Trial version while waiting for my company to complete the license purchase.
They completed the purchase of 4 licenses (64 bit), but were not given Product Keys. Instead, there is a particular .iso file with the license or product key embedded in some way.
I want to avoid having to uninstall Visual Studio 2013 only to reinstall Visual Studio 2013 and re-setup all my settings. Is this possible? Is there a way to extract the license/product key from the .iso or from other coworkers desktops that did a clean install?
Here is what I have tried (with 2 coworker installations):
Looking for the license info in:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\Licenses\*
but it is unique on both computers.
Looking for the Product Key in:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\Registration\2000.0x0000\PIDKEY
One install had one, which my install said was invalid when attempting to use it. The other install had a blank PIDKEY.
Looking inside SW_DVD5_Visual_Studio_Pro_2013_English_MLF_X19-20996.ISO but I see no mention of a License or Product Key.
Checking their Help > Register Product in Visual Studio, which simply says
License: Product key applied
Tried doing an install/repair from the ISO but it says:
The product version that you are trying to set up is earlier than the version already installed on this computer.
Likely because of the Visual Studio 2013 Update 1 and 2
Again, I would really like to avoid the multi-hour process of reinstalling VS 2013. Is there any way?
I solved this, without having to completely reinstall Visual Studio 2013.
For those who may come across this in the future, the following steps worked for me:
Run the ISO (or vs_professional.exe).
If you get the error below, you need to update the Windows Registry to trick the installer into thinking you still have the base version. If you don't get this error, skip to step 3
Click the link for 'examine the log file' and look near the bottom of the log, for this line:
open regedit.exe and do an Edit > Find... for that GUID. In my case it was {6dff50d0-3bc3-4a92-b724-bf6d6a99de4f}. This was found in:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall{6dff50d0-3bc3-4a92-b724-bf6d6a99de4f}
Edit the BundleVersion value and change it to a lower version. I changed mine from 12.0.21005.13 to 12.0.21000.13:
Exit the registry
Run the ISO (or vs_professional.exe) again. If it has a repair button like the image below, you can skip to step 4.
Otherwise you have to let the installer fix the registry. I did this by "installing" at least one feature, even though I think I already had all features (they were not detected). This took about 20 minutes.
Run the ISO (or vs_professional.exe) again. This time repair should be visible.
Click Repair and let it update your installation and apply its embedded license key. This took about 20 minutes.
Now when you run Visual Studio 2013, it should indicate that a license key was applied, under Help > Register Product:
Hope this helps somebody in the future!
Reference blog 'story'
I am aware that WebsiteSpark has been cancelled (along with Technet), but I know the accounts are still active until March.
I went to grab VS 2013 Professional only to find the following message:
This product is not available at your subscription level. Learn More
Will WebsiteSpark users be getting Visual Studio 2013?
I think you have to buy a MSDN subscription, buy you can try the Release candidate before it is released officially.
Go to your product keys page:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/keys/
If a key is listed for VS 2013 then you should be able to try it out.
You can download it from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/products/2013-editions#d-professional
Then, after installing, instead of signing into your account, you can register the product with the static key.
Here is what MS says:
"The product key is not embedded with Visual Studio 2013. When you launch the product, you can simply sign in with the Microsoft account associated with your MSDN subscription and your IDE will automatically activate. An added benefit of signing in to Visual Studio is that your IDE settings will sync across devices, and you can connect to online developer services. If you’d rather enter a product key, then simply bypass signing in and enter the product key found here by selecting Register Product under the Help menu."
I am Visual Studio 2010 Professional user. But for a reason I need Visual Web Developer 2008 Express edition.
I downloaded this, but I need the serial key to activate the product, otherwise it will expire in 30 days.
When I go there, I got this error:
"Thank you for your interest in registering Visual Studio. We are currently experiencing issues with the registration process. We are working on this and will have it fixed as soon as possible. Please try to register your product again at a later time. We apologize for the inconvenience."
I tried for a long time, but I got the same error every time. Is there any other way to get the serial key?
I have an improvement on the answer #DewiMorgan gave for VS 2008 express. I have since confirmed it also works on VS 2005 express.
It lets you run the software without it EVER requiring registration, and also makes it so you don't have to manually delete the key every 30 days. It does this by preventing the key from ever being written.
(Deleting the correct key can also let you avoid registering VS 2015 "Community Edition," but using permissions to prevent the key being written will make the IDE crash, so I haven't found a great solution for it yet.)
The directions assume Visual C# Express 2008, but this works on all the other visual studio express apps I can find.
Open regedit, head to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VCSExpress\9.0\Registration.
Delete the value Params.
Right click on the key 'Registration' in the tree, and click permissions.
Click Advanced...
Go to the permissions tab, and uncheck the box labeled Inherit from parent the permission entries that apply to child objects. Include these with entries explicitly defined here.
In the dialog that opens, click copy.
Note that in Windows 7 (and 8/8.1, I think), it appears the copy button was renamed to add, as in add inherited permissions as explicit permissions.
In Windows 10, it appears things changed again. #ravuya says that you might have to manually re-create some of the permissions, as the registry editor no longer offers this exact functionality directly. I don't use Windows very much anymore, so I'll defer to them:
On Win10, there is a button called "Disable Inheritance" that does the same thing as the checkbox mentioned in step 5. It is necessary to create new permissions just for Registration, instead of inheriting those permissions from an upstream registry key.
Hit OK in the 'Advanced' window.
Back in the first permissions window, click your user, and uncheck Full Control.
Do the same thing for the Administrators group.
Hit OK or Apply.
Congratulations, you will never again be plagued by the registration nag, and just like WinRAR, your trial will never expire.
You may have to do the same thing for other (non-Visual C#) programs, like Visual Basic express or Visual C++ express.
It has been reported by #IronManMark20 in the comments that simply deleting the registry key works and that Visual Studio does not attempt to re-create the key. I am not sure if I believe this because when I installed VS on a clean windows installation, the key was not created until I ran VS at least once. But for what it's worth, that may be an option as well.
The question is about VS 2008 Express.
Microsoft's web page for registering Visual Studio 2008 Express has been dead (404) for some time, so registering it is not possible.
Instead, as a workaround, you can temporarily remove the requirement to register VS2008Exp by deleting (or renaming) the registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/VCExpress/9.0/Registration
To ensure that this is working beforehand, click Help -> register product within VS2008.
You should see text like
"You have not yet registered your copy of Visual C++ 2008 Express
Edition. This product will run for 10 more days before you will be
required to register it."
Close the application, delete that key, reopen, click help->register product.
The text should now say
"You have not yet registered your copy of Visual C++ 2008 Express
Edition. This product will run for 30 more days before you will be
required to register it."
So you have two options - delete that key manually every 30 days, or run it from a batch file that also contains a line like:
reg delete HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VCExpress\9.0\Registration /f
[Edit: User #i486 confirms on testing that this workaround works even after the expiration period has expired]
[Edit2: User #Wyatt8740 has a much more elegant way to prevent the value from reappearing.]
Getting a product key is free. Here is how I did it:
I just downloaded the 2012 Express install ISO image. After install I got the message "This product will expire in 30 day(s). Registration is required for the continued use of Microsoft Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web."
On that same screen is a register online link. Clicking that I signed in with my live account, updated my profile, and got a registration key.
Visual C# Express 2005 ISO File does not require registration
I believe that if you download the offline ISO image file, and use that to install Visual Studio Express, you won't have to register.
Go here and find the link that says "All - Offline Install ISO image file". Click on it to expand it, select your language, and then click "Download".
Otherwise, it's possible that online registration is simply down for a while, as the error message indicates. You have 30 days before it expires, so give it a few days before starting to panic.