 On today's Visual Studio Toolbox, Aaron and Katie are going to show us the great resources available through Visual Studio Subscriptions. Hi, welcome to Visual Studio Toolbox. I'm your host, Robert Green, and joining me today are Aaron Mast and Katie Bushland. Hey, guys. Hey, thanks for having us. Welcome to the show. You guys are program managers in Visual Studio Land, and you're joining us today to talk about Visual Studio Subscriptions, which I think are an under-appreciated and under-utilized resource. As we're going to see, a lot of people watching probably have one, and there's great resources in there, but if people don't know that they have one and what's in there, then they can't really make use of it. So we're going to clear up a lot of confusion and point people to some really nice resources that they probably already have access to. Sound good? Sounds great. All right. So, Katie, why don't you kick it off and tell us what is a Visual Studio Subscription? Awesome. Yeah, so Visual Studio Subscriptions a couple years ago was actually renamed. It was MSDN Subscription, and so a lot of you may be sitting there saying, I don't have one of these Visual Studio Subscription things, but I do have an MSDN Subscription. So it actually is the same thing. You would have just been rolled over in your subscriptions program when the rebranding happened, and it basically gives you access to almost anything that Microsoft has released in the past for software downloads depending on your subscription level. We still have MSDOS if for some crazy reason that you want to go and grab a download of MSDOS, but you also have a whole bunch of other learning and professional development benefits. You have access to Azure through your subscription. So depending on what subscription you have, you can get up $150 in a monthly credit towards Azure. We have Pluralsight training, but it really is a huge collection of different pieces of software and training material that you get with your subscription. Okay, so if I had an MSDN Subscription, it's basically renamed and the things in it shift around from time to time. So that would be pretty obvious. How do I know, let's say I get Visual Studio from my employer, I may or may not have a subscription. How do I know? Yeah, the easiest way to check is just go to my.visualstudio.com. And if you have a subscription once you log in, you'll either be showing all of the benefits and everything that comes along with your subscription as long as what level you get as well. And if you don't, you'll be given a little message saying you don't have one and prompted to either register one that you previously purchased or purchase one or sign up for one. Okay. Yeah. Cool. So do you want to show us what it looks like? Yeah, for sure. All right, so once you come into the portal, you'll see at the top here what subscription you're actually signed in with. You'll see I'm with a Visual Studio Enterprise with GitHub. We have a featured benefit here and we're always changing what we're actually featuring and what benefits are offered. So it is good habit to come in here and check frequently to see what's changed, what's been added. We do put a little new tag on the new ones so that you will see easily what's been added since the last time you were in. You can toggle here between tools, your professional development. And the other cool thing is we have some support ones here too. So if you're stuck and you're coding something and you really need some one-on-one help, we have four, up to four technical support instance where you can actually get that hands-on support with someone who is hopefully an expert and can help you get unblocked there. So that's a really cool one to check out. For professional development, you know when you're at home right now, we're all stuck at home quarantined, everyone's trying to learn new skills. We have Pluralsight, LinkedIn Learning, which are really great ones, as well as Data Camp. And these ones, six months, six months, three months, I wouldn't recommend activating them all on the same day, kind of spread them out so you can extend your learning. Hopefully we're not in quarantine for the next year, but it's a good thing to stretch out. And who's my admin if I contact my admin? So if you contact your admin here, it opens up a web form and you can type a message to your admin. So if you have a question, you have a professional and you wanna get enterprise, for example, or someone in your company is trying to figure out how the heck they find a subscription, they can click that button and send a web form to their admin. Okay, and so the subscription dropdown shows me which one I have, but it also shows me what other ones there might be. Yeah, exactly. So most people will probably only have one. You may have two if you've signed up for DevEssentials as well. And DevEssentials is a three program, so I would recommend you take advantage of that one if you have Visual Studio standalone and you don't have a subscription yet. This one gives you kind of an intro to a bunch of those benefits. So if you have standalone, you can then upgrade to a subscription? You can join the DevEssentials program. Right. Which it's not a full subscription, like the Visual Studio professional subscription, but it does come with one month Pluralsight, two months of data camp, one month of LinkedIn, as well as one of the other really cool things is the, sorry, the Azure $200 credit as well. So it's not a monthly credit like the paid ones, but it does give you enough to get your feet wet and start playing around in Azure. Got it. Yeah, and then we have the download section here. So you can come into here and like I said, you can search for Windows DOS if you want. Depending on your subscription level, you will see different software that is available for download. But we actually have a list right here where you can download and Excel and actually go through and look for a specific product if you're not seeing it to see if it does come with your subscription level or not. Got it. It's a really good way to look at the differentiation between subscription levels for downloads. The best way to look at differentiation between subscription levels for benefits is actually on visualstudio.com, which I think is worth pointing out. There's a good tool on there that will show you the difference between, okay, it looks like she's bringing it up right here. Okay. Yeah, so visualstudio.microsoft.com slash vs slash benefits. You can toggle the dropdown here between subscription levels to see what exactly comes with each level. I see. And then toggle between the different categories here. Very cool. So it's a great way if you're trying to decide which one would work best for you. So we've talked about how I might already have a subscription through my employer. What are some of the other ways I can get a subscription? So the best way to see what your options are at any given time is to go to visualstudio.com to learn more. This is one of the pages you'll find there on visualstudio.com that shows some of the different options. We're looking at professional right now. This first column where it says monthly subscription, this is where you can license the IDE from month to month. If you click on my professional there, it'll take you to Azure and you'll go through an Azure flow to essentially rent the IDE from month to month and also some Azure DevOps access. Then there's the standard subscription that comes with much more of the benefits that Katie was showing on the portal earlier. And you can basically, if you buy a professional there, you'll be sent to the Microsoft store to purchase a license through their storefronts. Those are the two best ways if you're a consumer that's interested in getting a subscription, you can go and grab those. If you're at a company that assigns out subscriptions, then you can work with your administrator through the button that we talked about earlier or ask around, find people that have a subscription in your company, learn more. What we see in our data is that there are a lot of customers that have subscriptions that aren't being assigned out. So it's very likely that you may be in a situation where there's a subscription that's available, just they just need to know that you're interested. And so it's worth looking into it. Cool. One of the other important things I'll note, because I have heard a little bit of customer confusion over this, is just clarifying that visual studio professional subscription comes with the professional version of the IDE. So when you're looking at subscriptions to get, it's also important to look at the IDE and compare the features to make sure that you're getting the features in the IDE that you're looking for, be it professional or enterprise. Right. Okay. So if people have general questions about what's in the subscriptions or any questions about this, where can they, is there a, someone they can ask at Microsoft, is there a help page or a help alias or anything? Yeah, visualstudio.microsoft.com has a ton of information on it about subscriptions. So that's probably the best place to start. There's all sorts of comparisons there that you can use, be it comparisons for the IDE itself or the subscription levels or the pricing. If you're still stuck after that, you can find the support information on there and call our support team for help as well. Okay, cool. And then of course, Erin mentioned that, your company may have some available. For that one, our support team, of course, can't make your admin assign you a subscription. But if you know someone in your company that has it, ask them to use that contact at my admin button that we saw earlier and bug the admin on your behalf. That's probably the easiest way. That's probably a good place to start, right? In your company, find that if you have a subscription and then turn it on. All right, so one more thing. We have a newsletter that goes out generally on about a monthly cadence that lets you know of any new benefits have been added, anything cool that we wanna share with you. So if you're already a subscriber, make sure to go to your profile and opt in to get that newsletter if you're not already. Cool. So where can people go to learn more about this? There's a lot of cool stuff here that we've seen. Is there a central place people can go? Yep, you can check out aka.ms slash vs.substoolbox for more information. Awesome. So we've seen a lot of great stuff here, a lot of great resources. Highly encourage everybody to go check this out and take advantage of this great stuff. Thanks so much for coming on and showing this to us. Yeah, thanks for having us. Thanks. And we will see you next time on Visual Studio Toolbox.