Visual Studio 2015 Community edition in campus computing labs

[disk]

Not sure if anyone else has ran into this. Our faculty wanted to move from VS2012 to VS2015 for this fall semester. After seeing that it was free for educational use we went ahead and installed it in a few labs. I just now noticed that they are all saying we have 6 days left to activate. To activate, it appears you need to sign in with a Microsoft account. We have never required our students to have a Microsoft account and even if they did, these labs are used by many students every day and we use Deep Freeze to keep things clean. I posted in the MSDN forums regarding this but thought I would inquire here as well.

 

Does anyone have any sage advice for me? I am hoping there is an alternate activation method. I don't believe VS2013 Community had such a requirement. If I am forced to activate all these Visual Studio installs with a Microsoft account, I wonder if I can activate them all with one MS account. It wouldn't be fun but it could work. If there is a hard limit though, then I guess we're screwed.

[ass17]

Vs2013 community also required activation, when mine ran out I couldn't activate and had to re-install windows a fresh to activate.

[Zourous]

Not sure if anyone else has ran into this. Our faculty wanted to move from VS2012 to VS2015 for this fall semester. After seeing that it was free for educational use we went ahead and installed it in a few labs. I just now noticed that they are all saying we have 6 days left to activate. To activate, it appears you need to sign in with a Microsoft account. We have never required our students to have a Microsoft account and even if they did, these labs are used by many students every day and we use Deep Freeze to keep things clean. I posted in the MSDN forums regarding this but thought I would inquire here as well.

 

Does anyone have any sage advice for me? I am hoping there is an alternate activation method. I don't believe VS2013 Community had such a requirement. If I am forced to activate all these Visual Studio installs with a Microsoft account, I wonder if I can activate them all with one MS account. It wouldn't be fun but it could work. If there is a hard limit though, then I guess we're screwed.

 

Hi @disk

 

Did you try the single ms account? We are in the same situation.

[ass17]

Yes just use a single account on all PCs.

[Tricky]

Does it retain the Microsoft account details for other users on the machine? or do the students have to login to the shared account each time?

[ass17]

It doesn't for us, and logging in is optional. Logging is only required for online services.

[disk]

Didn't end up trying the single ms account method. I was able to get Visual Studio 2015 Professional from our MSDN account. The Pro version doesn't have the activation requirement that Community does. Working well for us now.

[eddyc]

Hello,

 

Sorry do dig up and old post but we are having a similar issue.

 

We currently have the community edition installed which is licensed but unlicensed every time that the machine is rebooted.

 

We have gone on the MVLS portal but there is no key for Visual Studio Professional 2015 and the volume license team say its no longer part of a schools agreement - Please can anyone confirm or deny if that is the case?

 

Kind regards, Ed

[LRSFC_DanJ]

I'd also like to know about this as we are installing VS Community 2015 in one of our computer rooms. We're not licensed for VS Professional (nor should we need to be, as Community says it is free for education classroom use) so we can't just use the key from VLSC (there is one there though).

 

If I create a Microsoft account specifically to activate it on all the classroom PCs, will that activation save for all users, and will it still mean they can use their own Microsoft accounts if they want to?

 

Thanks,

Dan Jackson (Lead ITServices Technician)

Long Road Sixth Form College

Cambridge, UK.