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You have a new Visual Studio subscription. What now?

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Congratulations on your new Visual Studio subscription. You now have access to the most comprehensive set of tools and resources to speed up development, promote collaboration anywhere, and innovative on any platform. If this subscription is your first, you might not be sure how to get started. This article introduces you to the subscription portal at my.visualstudio.com, and help you get started with some of the most popular benefits included in your subscription.

How to sign in to the portal

Signing in to the portal is simple. Just connect to https://my.visualstudio.com using the email address to which the subscription is assigned. Which email address you use can depend on how you got the subscription.

Learn how to:

A quick tour of the portal

There are four pages in the portal, each of which provides you with different capabilities.

  • Benefits - Go to this tab to see which benefits are included in your subscription, and activate them. You can filter the list of benefits by Tools, Professional Development, or Support to make it easy to find the benefits you want to activate.
  • Downloads - Depending on which subscription you have, you have access to product updates, patches, and full versions of hundreds of products and versions.
  • Product keys - This page provides you with access to the product keys you need to install and activate the software you download from the Downloads page.
  • Subscriptions - If you have more than one subscription, you can view and switch between them on this page. You can also view expiration dates, find support information, and even renew certain types of subscriptions.
  • Get Help - The Get Help page is your pathway to support for your subscriptions. You can view frequently asked questions, submit support cases, and access helpful information such as subscription and admin portal documentation.
  • Marketplace - If you're looking for extensions for Visual Studio, the Marketplace page is the place to find a large collection of the latest and most popular extensions for your IDE.

Get started using benefits

The benefits included in your subscription depend on which subscription you have. Most, though, include the Visual Studio IDE, individual Azure credits, and Azure DevOps. Some also include benefits such as Pluralsight training, Microsoft 365 Developer, and Microsoft 365 apps for enterprise.

Visual Studio

Visual Studio is the best comprehensive IDE for .NET and C++ developers on Windows. It has a sweet array of tools and features to elevate and enhance every stage of software development. Learn how to install Visual Studio.

Individual Azure credits

Most Visual Studio subscriptions include Azure credits every month that you can use to explore and try Azure services. When you activate your credits, you create a new Azure subscription, where you can start using them right away. No credit card is required. The number of Azure credits you receive depends on the type of Visual Studio subscription you have. When you reach the monthly cap for your credits, your Azure services stop until your next monthly credits are added unless you choose to remove the spending cap by upgrading to pay-as-you-go pricing.

To learn more about what you can do with Azure credits, check out the Monthly Azure credits for Visual Studio subscribers page.

To get started using Azure, visit the How to get started with your individual Azure Credit Subscription article in the Azure documentation.

Azure DevOps

A compound of development (Dev) and operations (Ops), DevOps is the union of people, process, and technology to continually provide value to customers.

What does DevOps mean for teams? DevOps enables formerly siloed roles—development, IT operations, quality engineering, and security—to coordinate and collaborate to produce better, more reliable products. When teams adopt a DevOps culture along with DevOps practices and tools, they gain the ability to better respond to customer needs, increase confidence in the applications they build, and achieve business goals faster.

As an active Visual Studio subscriber, you can use a range of features in Azure DevOps that are included with your subscription. You can use these same features in each Azure DevOps organization in which you're a member, whether you created the organization or someone else added you. Get started using Azure DevOps.

Resources

Visual Studio subscriptions support.

See also

Next steps

Get started using your benefits by signing in to https://my.visualstudio.com/benefits .