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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?

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  • 1
    None. It's free - forever. It's a full version - not a time-crippled demoware
    – marc_s
    Commented Aug 26, 2015 at 19:32
  • 3
    Nothing is forever with Microsoft, but yes, they are moving towards open-source community and cloud services, and base offline products such as Windows and Visual Studio are slowly becoming free. You pay only for advanced editions or for online services. I wish one day they open-source VS completely.
    – Drop
    Commented Aug 26, 2015 at 19:39

10 Answers 10

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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 2015 License Status Window

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    In my case, with Visual Studio Community 2015, even if I log out and log in, it won't update the license. It comes with the message: "We could not download a license. Please check your network connection or proxy settings." And this message is quite weird, because I am not behind a proxy and the sign in works correctly. Only the license update is not working. Any clues?
    – dannyxyz22
    Commented Jul 11, 2016 at 13:48
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    @dannyxyz22 You can try asking a new question. I can only suggest ensuring that you have the latest version of Internet Explorer installed.
    – Ross Ridge
    Commented Jul 11, 2016 at 16:01
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    I saw the same message. I tried the 'Check for an updated license', and it rectified itself. I am not sure if it was just a temporary glitch or if clicking that was the actual fix though.
    – dra_red
    Commented Aug 2, 2016 at 19:35
  • The license seems to stay even after I log out, so that's just a one-time activation.
    – Franklin Yu
    Commented Aug 18, 2017 at 18:38
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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.

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Here is a simple approach to sneak by that stupid blocker screen in Visual Studio after 30-days expires using Process Hacker:

VS2015 Trial

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.

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    link is broken.
    – Yannick Smits
    Commented Aug 13, 2018 at 11:47
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    Link is broken. But still i resolved this issue with my own trick. Just change the system date to some 30 days back. Close and reopen visual studio. Congrats,You are able to access now.
    – Praveen Patel G
    Commented Dec 17, 2018 at 5:08
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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.

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4

You can use "RunasDate" to solve this.

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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.

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    There is an expiration date. It just doesn't require money to activate, just a free account. See the better answers below.
    – Goose
    Commented Jan 28, 2016 at 14:29
  • If you still have an expiration issue, please follow this link for how to resolve it. I used Method 3 to resolve my issue.
    – nam
    Commented Jan 30, 2016 at 1:08
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    There in fact is an evaluation period, after which you have to create an account.
    – mishmash
    Commented Mar 13, 2016 at 16:40
  • i am getting annoying message after 30 days and unable to work on visual studio. I created an account but do not really know what to do now in order to remove the license expired pop up when i start VS
    – kuldeep
    Commented May 9, 2016 at 3:26
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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.

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1

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.

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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.

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  • 2
    In my case, with Visual Studio Community 2015, even if I log in, it won't update the license. It comes with the message: "We could not download a license. Please check your network connection or proxy settings." And this message is quite weird, because I am not behind a proxy and the sign in works correctly. Only the license update is not working. Any clues?
    – dannyxyz22
    Commented Jul 11, 2016 at 13:45
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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: enter image description here

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.

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  • I assume that the token will go stale only for Enterprise and Professional version, not for Community version? This question is about Visual Studio Community.
    – Franklin Yu
    Commented Aug 18, 2017 at 18:31
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    I have outlook.com.after signout and login to google account .community licence activated
    – lava
    Commented Oct 28, 2020 at 14:30

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