Visual Studio Professional with Microsoft Action Pack

Question

Microsoft Action Pack is an annual subscription from Microsoft for Microsoft partners, and one of the advertised benefits is "three Visual Studio Professional licenses". When I log in, I can see some of the other software benefits, but I can not find out how to download VS Professional except as a 90 day trial. Any ideas?

Answer 1

If anyone is still looking for an answer:

At the time of this writing each Action Pack subscription grants "a Visual Studio Professional subscription [...] to individuals that are assigned the role of technical contact" (source: Partner Network Program Administrator Guide). Meaning: the 3 Persons listed in the Partner Membership Center at the Program Contacts (Partner Membership Center > Requirements & Assets > Assign Contact Roles) section with the role of either First-, Second-, or Third Technical Contact get a Visual Studio Professional subscription in their Microsoft Account.

These following steps get you there:

1. Make sure that every person which wants to use Visual Studio is associated with your Partner Organization ID.

   If someone is missing, you can send out invitations with the form at Partner Membership Center > Requirements & Assets > Invite People to Associate > Add new People. You can already assign them the required Technical Contact role on that invitation form.

   Alternatively you can give them your Organization Partner ID and they can request association with your company when they login to the Partner Membership Center.

2. Using the login link included in the invitation email each person has to accept the association to your organization.

3. If you haven't already assigned the Technical Contact role at the invitation form, you can assign (or change) that role at Partner Membership Center > Requirements & Assets > Assign Contact Roles.

After those steps the subscription will show up at the persons Visual Studio Subscriptions page. There might be some time between the association and the subscription showing up - in one of my cases it took several hours after the person was already successfully listed as technical contact.

Also in my experience the subscription only shows up when the persons mail address that is used for the Microsoft Account is the same address listed in the Partner Membership Center. While you can accept the invitation logged in with a different (i.e. private) account, the Visual Studio Professional subscription itself is only granted to a Microsoft account with the same email as the email to which the invitation was issued.

Answer 2

Before I had posted the question, I had googled to see if I could find the answer, and I went round and round and round Microsoft's partner website. All the software benefits were available to download at that site, except Visual Studio!

Microsoft's UK Twitter account suggested I contact support - they showed me that I had to set up a technical contact for my account, then go to MSDN (which I don't have), and activate the benefit there. To make things a little more complex, my partner login email is different from my MSDN login email.

Answer 3

With the new partner dashboard there is a new way to gain your visual studio licenses.

Please follow this article: Microsoft Partner Network (MPN) Visual Studio Subscriptions: Access and Manage your Visual Studio subscriptions

Note: If you have to choose between MAPS and LAPS after clicking "Benefits", just choose MAPS. Then you should be able to see the subscriptions as shown in their screenshots.