Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 - How to Stop Annoying Notifications

Question

Just installed Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 and now I see this annoying red notification telling me I need a developer licence for Windows Store and Windows Phone - which I do not need.

Once I click dismiss all, it comes back next time I load Visual Studio, the same notification I dismissed. In other words how many times will it tell me I need a licence? So my point is how do I stop displaying the red notification.

[edit] Actually it's prompting me every so often not just every visual studio restart... as I think someone has mentioned in one of the comments.

Answer 1

LATEST UPDATE (Nov-21): We have now released a patch for this bug. You can download it from here.

I'm leaving the rest of this answer as is but there should no longer be a need for any workaround once the patch linked to above has been applied.

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ORIGINAL ANSWER: I'll start by apologizing and confirming we've got at least one bug here (if not more). There are several of us actively investigating this on our side. We don't yet know the full extent of the problem though so it would be great to get some additional information from anyone who's currently running into this.

The intent was to show a notification to users working on Windows or Windows Phone Store apps. It was not something that should be coming up for users not doing Store development.

The most promising workaround so far is to:

1. Close the currently open solution (if there is one loaded)
2. Dismiss the notification
3. Close Visual Studio

You shouldn't see the notification again in subsequent VS sessions until you do something that causes the Store related functionality to load again (e.g., create or load a Store app project).

If this doesn't make it go away, please respond and we'll try to work with you to get more details on what could be causing it to continue to appear for you.

UPDATE: If the above workaround doesn't work for you (e.g., ReSharper users), I've got another one that should at least provide a respite from the notifications for about a month at a time:

1. Make sure the critical notification is currently active (i.e., red notification).
2. Close all open instances of Visual Studio.
3. Open up File Explorer and navigate to the %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\Notifications directory.
4. Open the Notifications_Active.xml file found in in a text editor.
5. Find the notification element referring to the developer license.
6. Change the value of the Severity element to 0 instead of 2.

This should make the red alert no longer kick in for this notification as long as you leave the notification active (i.e., do not dismiss it).