How to disable the Visual Studio 2019 user sign in and theme selection windows at startup ?

Breedy, Andrew 41 Reputation points
2020-12-17T11:19:59.457+00:00

I am deploying a pool of virtual machines with Visual Studio 2019 installed. However when Visual Studio is launched a user is presented with two windows asking for a user sign in and to select a theme before the dev environment is loaded.

I want to disable the user sign in and theme windows and go straight to the normal dev environment when a user starts Visual Studio. The virtual machines are test machines running an automated script to launch and carry out some tasks within Visual Studio so there are no actual live end users to sign in or select a theme.

I have clicked past the startup windows in my master image and disabled the startup requests in the environment settings (environment \ startup \ empty environment) but this works only for the current logged on user on my master image. My virtual machines each have different users and so each user requests the user sign in and theme on startup every time.

Is there a way of disabling the sign in and theme selections in the registry of my virtual machine master image or through group policy ?

Thanks,
Andrew

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A family of Microsoft suites of integrated development tools for building applications for Windows, the web and mobile devices.
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Visual Studio Setup
Visual Studio Setup
Visual Studio: A family of Microsoft suites of integrated development tools for building applications for Windows, the web and mobile devices.Setup: The procedures involved in preparing a software program or application to operate within a computer or mobile device.
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Accepted answer
  1. Anna Xiu-MSFT 24,636 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor
    2020-12-18T06:43:48.063+00:00

    Hi @Breedy, Andrew ,

    Thank you for reporting it in Microsoft Q&A.

    When you open Visual Studio for the first time, you are asked to sign in. It is by design. But you can temporarily select “Not now, maybe later” in sign-in window.

    If you need to sign in Visual Studio with different users, you can add additional accounts via File > Account Settings > All Accounts > add an account. And you don’t have to sign in it separately. Unless you signed out, you are automatically signed in to Visual Studio whenever you start it.

    Meanwhile, I suggest you enable the Synchronized settings via Tools > Options > Environment > Accounts > check “Synchronize settings across devices when signed into Visual Studio” so that any changes to synchronized settings are automatically applied.

    Sincerely,
    Anna

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  1. Kevin Jameson 21 Reputation points
    2022-05-29T02:27:47.823+00:00

    My VS 2022 opens the login window every time I open any project. It's an awful experience because I have to manually close N login windows after opening N solutions every day. Just awful. You guys should give people some way to disable the login prompt permanently.