Upgrading from Community to Professional - seems impossible, how!?

Question

_{Tuesday, September 15, 2015 1:41 PM}

Hello

We've been using Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition (testing C#6) and have now purchased 2015 Professional licences through the Microsoft Store (finally available to purchase in the last couple weeks). There's even a link which says "Ready to buy Visual Studio? Order Online". And that Order Online link is the one I followed which takes you through to the Microsoft Store.

However I cannot figure out how to apply the licence in VS Community? Going to Help > Register Product just shows that Community is licensed to my live ID, but there's no way to change key or a place to enter the key received from the Microsoft Store.

Are you really going to make me uninstall VS Community 2015 on all our developer machines and download and install the different version? Surely I can just change product key....

Help please,

Marcus

All replies (6)

_{Tuesday, September 15, 2015 1:54 PM ✅Answered | 1 vote}

Hi Marcus,

You can just install VS2015 Professional over VS2015 Community.

Just download the installer for VS2015 Professional from https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/downloads/download-visual-studio-vs.aspx

When you run it direct, it will actually upgrade Visual Studio 2015 Community to Professional. Post that you just need to insert the product key to register it.

Please mark as answer or vote as helpful if my reply does

_{Wednesday, September 16, 2015 9:09 AM ✅Answered | 1 vote}

Ahh there's the real answer!

I have multiple computers to upgrade, so went for the single ISO download as expected the EXE installer to pretty much download the full ISO on every machine it was ran from. However turns out it can make the upgrade quite quickly with minimal download.

This sort of thing should be documented as it's counter intuitive - with lots of PC's to update you'd generally download the file once and distribute locally.

_{Tuesday, September 15, 2015 2:42 PM | 1 vote}

Thanks, however it's a shame I have to download the 4GB installation just to change edition. Will have to leave this for an overnight download.

_{Tuesday, September 15, 2015 10:02 PM}

I did the same steps Rachit did but went from Community to Enterprise and it did not download a 4 GB file, just a small exe and then brought the components in after I selected the features I wanted. 

_{Wednesday, June 29, 2016 6:51 AM}

I need to covert my VS2015 Professional to Community. 

Is that possible? If yes how?

Vibhor Agarwal

_{Wednesday, June 29, 2016 7:10 AM}

Hi Vibhor,

my first suggestion is to not append new questions to old threads where some replies are already marked as answer. These threads often are seen as "closed" and people no longer look into these threads. So my recommendation is to open a new thread for new questions.

Regarding your problem: I don't know of an easy way to do this. So my suggestion is to uninstall the professional installation and then install the community edition.

I did a downgrade in the past (Enterprise -> Professional) and I think that I ran into some trouble because some stuff was left over and I had problems with a few projects. I think the cause was some registry keys that told Visual Studio that stuff is available that wasn't available so far (e.g. some lightswitch stuff and some ASP.Net stuff). I had to check the logs to see what was missing aso I could then install the missing stuff (which was available for installation as separate package and which I had installed on the Enterprise Edition, too).

I did the uninstall with the original installer and called it with /uninstall /force. So my recommendation is to use the Visual Studio Installer (e.g. vs_professional.exe) and call it with these parameters.

Because of my problems it might even be worth to use the uninstaller tool for a cleanup. It is an open source tool available at https://github.com/Microsoft/VisualStudioUninstaller/releases.

With kind regards,

Konrad