How can I switch my signed in user in Visual Studio 2013?

A new feature of Visual Studio 2013 is the ability to sign in with a Microsoft Account and have your settings be persisted across all of your instances of Visual Studio, amongst other things.

When I installed Visual Studio 2013 Preview I signed in with one of several Microsoft Accounts I hold.

I've now installed the RTM version of Visual Studio 2013 (after uninstalling the Preview version) and that has kept my previous user sign in credentials.

I would now like to change these sign in credentials to be a different Microsoft Account but every time I attempt to sign in with the new details I receive a message similar to the following

We were unable to establish the connection because it is configured for user [email protected] but you attempted to connect using user [email protected]. To connect as a different user perform a switch user operation. To connect with the configured identity just attempt the last operation again.

The problem is I can't find any documentation anywhere on how to perform a "switch user operation". Maybe I'm just not looking hard enough but hopefully someone here can help me out.


Solution 1:

There is a comment about this under this answer, but I think it's important to list it here. If you want to preserve your settings, export them first because they will be lost.

From MSDN forums - since I had to hunt around far too much to find the solution to this:

  1. Close Visual Studio
  2. Start the Developer Command prompt installed with Visual Studio as an administrator.
  3. type 'devenv /resetuserdata' ('wdexpress /resetuserdata' for Express SKUs)
  4. Start Visual Studio Normally.

Worked for me.

Solution 2:

I was able to fix this by: 1) Sign in as the old user. 2) Sign out. 3) Sign in as new user.

In my case, it appears that it wanted to verify my license on the old account first, before it would let me switch to a new one.

Solution 3:

I resolved this problem by deleting the registry key under

hkey_current_user\software\Microsoft\VSCommon\12.0\clientservices\tokenstorage\visualstudio\ideuser

Solution 4:

None of the above worked for me - the following did:

devenv /ResetSettings

The nice thing about this option was it didn't wipe out all of my Visual Studio configuration (as /ResetUserData does)

Solution 5:

You don't need to reset all your user data to switch users. Try clicking on your name in the upper right corner then click on "Account settings". There you will get an option to sign out of the IDE. Once signed out you can sign back in as another Microsoft account.