

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. Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2013 – English Download here. Microsoft Visual Studio Test Professional 2013 – English Download here. Microsoft Visual Studio Premium 2013 – English DVD5 ISO image (SHA-1: E8CFBDDC940DA1E73498BADF8F556564B583E298) Microsoft Visual Studio Ultimate 2013 – English DVD5 ISO image (SHA-1: 79DBBA7B6EF12B1A4E715A7F20951EE66FBCDAB4)
