Visual Studio Management 2019
Sharolyn Uriegas
Depending on the size and needs of your organization, there are several options available to you. Take a look at our page for purchasing Visual Studio subscriptions to see what works best for your organization.
If you are a Super Admin you can add or remove other Super Admins or Administrators. Administrators can only add or remove subscribers and will not see the Manage Administrators tab on manage.visualstudio.com.
Cloud subscriptions are managed by administrators who are assigned to the Azure subscription used to purchase the cloud subscriptions. The owner of the subscription is automatically assigned as the first administrator.
Individuals who are assigned a subscription will receive periodic communications from the Visual Studio team, including an email letting them know they have been assigned a subscription. If these emails should be sent to a separate email address than that which they should sign into the Visual Studio Subscriptions Portal or VS IDE you can add a notification email address when adding a subscriber, or when editing an existing subscriber.
You can export your subscribers from your previous agreement and add them to your new agreement using the Bulk Add button. Note: your subscribers will receive an email when the new subscription is assigned to them. Learn more about exporting subscribers and using the Bulk Add feature.
Subscriptions are always assigned using the best available end date. For example, if your agreement has orders with an end date of 6/20/2020 and another one with an end date of 6/20/2021 the first subscription to be assigned from those two available will end on 6/20/2021. If you have a trusted agreement in an overallocated state, the end date will be 3 years from the date the subscription was assigned.
The subscription is active and can be used as soon as it has been assigned from within the Visual Studio Administrator portal. Your subscriber can sign into the Visual Studio Subscribers portal or VS IDE right away, and will receive a welcome email letting them know the subscription has been assigned.
Depending on what product your subscriber has downloaded it can either be activated by logging in using the email address tied to the subscription, or subscribers can activate it by claiming a product key from the Visual Studio Subscriber portal.
A Microsoft Account (MSA) is a personal email account owned by an individual to access Microsoft services when an organization is not using a managed tenant for Office 365 or Azure Active Directory. A work account is one owned by the organization that issues it and is used to access services on Office 365 or Azure Active Directory tenants. For complete information about the differences between MSAs and work accounts, check out the Learn about the differences in using MSAs (Microsoft Accounts) vs. Work Accounts (Azure Active Directory or Office 365) and how this may impact your organization.
When you cancel a Visual Studio cloud subscription, you are canceling automatic renewal. The subscription continues until its normal renewal date and then simply expires. At expiration, the Visual Studio subscriber can no longer use Visual Studio or any other benefits from the subscription.
With monthly cloud subscriptions, cancellations take effect the first day of the next month. If you only cancel some of your monthly cloud subscriptions, be sure to remove users on the first of the next month to ensure that the correct people continue to have active subscriptions assigned.
For annual cloud subscriptions, cancellations take effect the first day of the month following 12 months from the original purchase, or 12 months from the last annual renewal charge. For instance, if you bought a Visual Studio Professional annual cloud subscription on January 3, 2018 then it remains active until February 1, 2019 when it automatically renews for another year. If you cancel at any time between then and February 1, 2020 then the subscription will expire on February 1, 2020. There is no rebate for canceling part way through the subscription year with annual cloud subscriptions.
If you are in an enterprise context where you work with .net development teams, the chances are real that they use a "Visual studio license" and that this license is managed in what is called an "Enterprise Agreement". This agreement allows organizations to buy "Visual Studio Licenses" from Microsoft. Subsequently, these license can then be assigned to the individual users in the development teams, based on their roles.
This "license management" can be done (if you have the correct permissions) on the the following visual studio management portal: the "Manage subscribers" tab, you can select your enterprise agreement (if you have multiple) and then you get an overview of the subscribers, with their assigned licenses:
The reason that I'm writing about this, means of course that there is a solution... In the beginning, you really had to log in into the management portal and follow the procedure that I described above. But the interesting thing is that Microsoft added the possibility to assign licenses to Azure Active Directory Groups or even local AD groups, which are synced to Azure AD:
These groups can be managed from outside of the management portal and also provide the means to be more transparent about who has which license assigned. (This "new" feature was added already a long time ago, but I never got to investigating it... until now!)
Below, I'll go deeper into how you can implement this and what you need to look at. I'll also provide you with a script that allows you to import an extract from the management portal into the (local) AD groups:
Let's suppose that we are going to assign VS licenses for Enterprise, Professional, TestProfessional and Platforms, then you would need to create AD groups for this. A possible format might be the following:
Then all you need to do is to "Add your newly (and preferably populated) created AD Groups". The benefit of adding already populated groups, is that the portal will do a validation/cleanup during the process and it will remove all the "directly assigned licenses". This means that if you were able to add all users to the correct AD group (which relates to a Visual Studio License), then your result should be a portal that "only has AD groups in the reference list". If there are however (as in my case) users that were not added to an ad-group, then you need to investigate (and find a solution for this).
One of the added benefits is that you can hook this up in a people in/out process where the correct VS license is assigned automatically and where a cleanup is done for you when the user leaves the company and where the account is removed from AD.
Another benefit is that you can make a specific team manager of these ad groups and give them the ownership of the "license management", which allows you to put the responsibility in the most logical place!
Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and Visual Studio (VS) are both popular software tools used by developers and database administrators. While they have some similarities, there are several key differences between them.
1. Purpose and Functionality: \nSSMS is primarily designed for managing and administering SQL Server databases. It provides a rich set of tools for writing and executing queries, managing database objects, and analyzing performance. On the other hand, VS is an integrated development environment (IDE) primarily used for creating software applications. It offers extensive features for coding, debugging, and testing various programming languages.
2. Database-centric vs. Application-centric: \nSSMS is focused on database-related tasks and is specifically tailored for working with SQL Server databases. It provides specialized tools for database design, schema modifications, and data management. VS, on the other hand, is more application-centric and flexible, supporting a wide range of programming languages and frameworks. It allows developers to build complete software solutions, including front-end interfaces, business logic, and database integration.
3. User Interface and Workflow: \nSSMS has a dedicated user interface optimized for managing databases. It provides a logical and intuitive workflow for performing common database operations. VS, being a more general-purpose IDE, has a more complex and customizable interface, with a broader range of functionalities. It is designed to support different development scenarios and can be tailored to individual preferences and project requirements.
4. Integrated Development Environment Features: \nWhile SSMS offers some basic development features like query editing and debugging, these are more limited compared to the comprehensive development capabilities of VS. VS includes advanced features like code refactoring, version control integration, unit testing frameworks, and extensive debugging options. These additional development tools make VS a preferred choice for developers working on complex software projects.
5. Extensibility and Ecosystem: \nSSMS has a relatively limited ecosystem with a focus on SQL Server. It provides a range of built-in tools and extensions specific to SQL Server, but the overall extension capabilities are somewhat restricted. VS, on the other hand, has a much larger and diverse ecosystem, with a vast collection of extensions, plugins, and integrations available. This makes VS more versatile and adaptable to different development scenarios and technologies.
6. Licensing and Cost: \nBoth SSMS and VS have different licensing models. SSMS is generally available as a free download and is included with the SQL Server installation. Some advanced features may require a paid SQL Server license. VS, on the other hand, has multiple editions with different pricing models. The Community edition of VS is free for individual developers and small teams, but other editions may require a paid license. This difference in licensing can impact the overall cost for users.
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