Introduction Recently, I mentioned that the newly minted Visual Studio 2013 asks you to to tie your copy to a specific account. 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.

I assume this also will apply to retail copies as well. I discovered by scrolling through MSDN license keys that it is possible to unlock Visual Studio without needing to use a Microsoft account. Let’s see how.

Get a Product Key You’ll need to have an which matches the version of Visual Studio you are using. Authenticate to MSDN Subscriptions and go to the Subscriber Downloads section. Here you’ll see a tab for “”. In the list of keys there should be static activation keys for your account. Find and copy out the product key for your version of Visual Studio 2013 (e.g. Premium, Ultimate etc).

Update: Here’s the relevant section which specifies the static activation key: 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. 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?). Install Visual Studio 2013.and then launch the program. Indmar Serial Number Location on this page. 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. This skips the sign in process: There’s some additional configuration collected: Once that is finished, the main Visual Studio IDE should load with the Welcome Page™. From here, go to the HELP menu and select “Register Product”: This brings you to a substantial looking dialog, again this is a bit counter-intuitive. Much like Windows, what your aim here is to give the product a new Product Key (a random one is used when installed new).

Oct 21, 2015 I reinstalled visual studio 2013 but i don't know its product key. Could you tell me some tip and tweak to recover visual studio 2013 product key. How to change Visual Studio 2012,2013 or 2015. For those who will need to remove product key from Visual Studio. How to change Visual Studio 2015 License Key?

The option (or link) you want is “Change my product license”: 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: Assuming your new Product Key is valid, the key should validate and you should ideally restart Visual Studio. Before you fire up Visual Studio again, there’s some minor housekeeping which I’d recommend. Housekeeping The next logical step is to fire up the registry editor (regedit) and add the: HKEY_CURRENT_USER Software Microsoft VisualStudio 12.0 General SuppressUppercaseConversion REG_DWORD value: 1 Much nicer! This key forces Visual Studio to revert to normalized menu naming, because we all dislike those menu items shouting at us in UPPER CASE, don’t we?

Summary That’s it. Visual Studio is now licensed and ready to go.