Skip to main content

Visual Studio–License validation task failed unexpectedly

Yesterday I talked about how I got into trouble after updating Visual Studio. No matter what I tried my Visual Studio instance closed after a few seconds without any error or warning. I explained how I found the root cause by activating the Activity log.

There I found the following warning:

License validation task failed unexpectedly.

What higher in the document I found a related error message:

The input is not a valid Base-64 string as it contains a non-base 64 character

I started a search on the Internet to find a solution and discovered the following article: Visual Studio 2022 crashing on startup - Microsoft Q&A

This brought me to the final solution. Here are the exact steps I took:

  • I browsed to the C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VSCommon\OnlineLicensing\VisualStudio folder.

  • I removed both the 17.x folders.
  • Now I reopened Visual Studio. Visual Studio noticed that my license information is gone and shows me the following screen:

  • Here I clicked on the check for an updated license and signed in with my Microsoft account. After successful signing in my license file was renewed and I could continue working.

 

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

DevToys–A swiss army knife for developers

As a developer there are a lot of small tasks you need to do as part of your coding, debugging and testing activities.  DevToys is an offline windows app that tries to help you with these tasks. Instead of using different websites you get a fully offline experience offering help for a large list of tasks. Many tools are available. Here is the current list: Converters JSON <> YAML Timestamp Number Base Cron Parser Encoders / Decoders HTML URL Base64 Text & Image GZip JWT Decoder Formatters JSON SQL XML Generators Hash (MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512) UUID 1 and 4 Lorem Ipsum Checksum Text Escape / Unescape Inspector & Case Converter Regex Tester Text Comparer XML Validator Markdown Preview Graphic Color B
Read more

Help! I accidently enabled HSTS–on localhost

I ran into an issue after accidently enabling HSTS for a website on localhost. This was not an issue for the original website that was running in IIS and had a certificate configured. But when I tried to run an Angular app a little bit later on http://localhost:4200 the browser redirected me immediately to https://localhost . Whoops! That was not what I wanted in this case. To fix it, you need to go the network settings of your browser, there are available at: chrome://net-internals/#hsts edge://net-internals/#hsts brave://net-internals/#hsts Enter ‘localhost’ in the domain textbox under the Delete domain security policies section and hit Delete . That should do the trick…
Read more

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more