[visual-studio] Visual Studio Community 2015 expiration date

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?

This question is related to visual-studio visual-studio-2015

The answer is


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


You can use "RunasDate" to solve this.


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.