How do I apply a Visual Studio Online Professional license to Visual Studio 2013

Question

I recently purchased a single user license for Visual Studio Online Professional in order to make use of the fact that it grants a monthly subscription license for the Visual Studio Professional IDE as well as all the features of basic VSO.

I ran into problems trying to apply the license to Visual Studio since VSO uses Azure Active Directory accounts to authenticate and these are not considered Microsoft Accounts. This means that when you go to Help -> Register and try to sign in you get an error telling you that it is not a MS account.

It appears that there is little or no documentation about this online.

Answer 1

To register a "Visual Studio Online" professional license within Visual Studio 2013 Professional ID you simply need to connect the trial version of Visual studio 2013 Professional to your Visual Studio Online TFS instance.

Note that this will not work if you have an MSDN license (either signin or product key applied to your Visual Studio 2013 IDE already. You must remove these first.

To remove a product key license from VS2013 please see the answer at https://stackoverflow.com/a/22258088/285470