I have a friend who needs to reinstall windows, but he can't find his VS2008 activation code/product key. Is there a way to look up which product key he entered when he last installed VS2008 in the registry? Any other method of finding the key is also welcome.
This question is related to
visual-studio-2008
registry
Just delete key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/VCExpress/9.0/Registration
Or run in command line:
reg delete HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VCExpress\9.0\Registration /f
For Visual Studio 2005:
If you do have an installed Visual Studio 2005 however, and want to find out the serial number you’ve used to install it because you don’t have a clue where you put that shiny sticker, you can. It is, like most things in Windows, in the registry.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\Registration\PIDKEY
In order to convert the value in that key to an actual serial number you have to put a dash ( – ) after evert 5 characters of the code.
From: http://www.gooli.org/blog/visual-studio-2005-serial-number/
For Visual Studio 2008 it's supposed to be:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\Registration\PIDKEY
However I noted that the the Data field for PIDKEY is only filled in the 1000.0x000 (or 2000.0x000) sub folder of the above paths.
I found the product key for Visual Studio 2008 Professional under a slightly different key:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\MSDN\8.0\Registration\PIDKEY
it was listed without the dashes as stated above.
Source: Stackoverflow.com