Before you fire up Visual Studio again, there’s some minor housekeeping which I’d recommend. This presents you with a smaller modal dialog where you can now paste in the key you obtained from MSDN earlier, note this requires elevated permissions for some reason:Īssuming your new Product Key is valid, the key should validate and you should ideally restart Visual Studio. The option (or link) you want is “Change my product license”: Much like Windows, what your aim here is to give the product a new Product Key (a random one is used when installed new). This brings you to a substantial looking dialog, again this is a bit counter-intuitive. From here, go to the HELP menu and select “Register Product”: Once that is finished, the main Visual Studio IDE should load with the Welcome Page™. There’s some additional configuration collected: You’ll be prompted after the initial configuration to authenticate using a Microsoft Account – click on the second option in the smaller font, right below the “Sign In” button. A boxed product should have a Product Key on the media (or box) and a soft copy should have a key associated with it somehow (maybe it is mailed to you?). If you don’t have an MSDN subscription, but have instead purchased a retail copy of Visual Studio 2013, there should be a Product Key with the product. Update: Here’s the relevant section which specifies the static activation key: Find and copy out the product key for your version of Visual Studio 2013 (e.g. In the list of keys there should be static activation keys for your account. Here you’ll see a tab for “ My Product Keys”. Authenticate to MSDN Subscriptions and go to the Subscriber Downloads section. You’ll need to have an MSDN Subscription which matches the version of Visual Studio you are using. I discovered by scrolling through MSDN license keys that it is possible to unlock Visual Studio without needing to use a Microsoft account. I assume this also will apply to retail copies as well. This comes in the wake of Visual Studio no longer being pre-pidded (when a product has a license key included in the installation media) when you obtain a copy from MSDN – for MSDN subscription holders, of course. Recently, I mentioned that the newly minted Visual Studio 2013 asks you to authenticate with a Microsoft account to tie your copy to a specific account.
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