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.