See Also

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/howtobuy/ appears to be missing. I am sure lots of trial users would love it if they could Upgrade before their trial ends. Thanks! x

Please fix the broken link, it's annoying.

I think this is the correct link:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/aa700832.aspx

Don't want to wait for a product to ship, just want to pay for the serial number, upgrade my trial version and be done with it. I keep getting directed around in circles and it's annoying.

Give me one link to click to buy the serial number please.

Granted the upgrade process (should be) painless and is apparently intended to be painless, there is no mention out here about upgrading from an install of VS Pro 2008 90-day trial version to a VS Pro 2008 Academic version.

I had the academic version installed on this very same machine, on a Vista Ultimate installation, and lost my partition over the holiday weekend. After rebuilding my machine and having to use a trial edition of VS over the weekend, I am now unable to use the Product Key for the education version previously installed.

This makes - zero - sense. I dont want uninstall, then reinstall. It is the exact same product. There is absolutely no difference here. So why isnt the license accepted when I use these steps?

Please provide the correct steps, the appropriate link, a link to a KB article, or a phone number that one needs to call in this scenario.

Thanks much - keep up the excellent work.

Please include a vendor who can send a product key via email, as mentioned in the instructions!

From the instructions given on this page, does that mean that we simply enter the product key of our retail version in the pop-up window that is launched after we choose the Trial Version icon found in the Add/Change programs? Thank you!

Echoing NicoVanDamas; why should academic users have no way up upgrading an install to the academic version of the same program? It's all the same key-based system anyway, so surely it should be possible to extract the key into the upgrade-key box of the installation wizard, when the VS2008.iso file is inserted into the virtual DVD-drive and setup is run? Doing a re-install of VS also doesn't help except clear the memory a little, but the key is the same.

Dido to the previous comments - what a waste of time. Someone went through the bother of packaging the Academic version and never even mentions this problem? Let alone solve it.

why did my 90 day trial EXPIRE after 1 day?????????????? Took me 8 hours to download, cause im out of town on weak dsl connection. And now as i go to use it, the damn things experied. WTF????

Im ready to shoot myself, i cannot miss 2 weeks of assignment cause microsoft trial guys are morons???

what am i supposed to do?

I bought a copy of Visual Studio 2005 by MSDN. CD/DVD comes without product key. Product key is preset on CD/DVD, so how do I get a valid product key to upgrade trial installation?

The visual Studio home page is broken while viewing in IE 7.
The display is messed up, the links are inoperative or have the same problems, and there are errors generated on the page messages in the status bar. Bad Link is:
http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/professional/default.mspx