I have an improvement on the answer @DewiMorgan gave for VS 2008 express. I have since confirmed it also works on VS 2005 express.
It lets you run the software without it EVER requiring registration, and also makes it so you don’t have to manually delete the key every 30 days. It does this by preventing the key from ever being written.
(Deleting the correct key can also let you avoid registering VS 2015 “Community Edition,” but using permissions to prevent the key being written will make the IDE crash, so I haven’t found a great solution for it yet.)
The directions assume Visual C# Express 2008, but this works on all the other visual studio express apps I can find.
- Open regedit, head to
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VCSExpress\9.0\Registration
. - Delete the value
Params
.
- Right click on the key ‘Registration’ in the tree, and click
permissions
. - Click
Advanced...
- Go to the
permissions
tab, and uncheck the box labeledInherit from parent the permission entries that apply to child objects. Include these with entries explicitly defined here.
- In the dialog that opens, click
copy
.
Note that in Windows 7 (and 8/8.1, I think), it appears thecopy
button was renamed toadd
, as inadd inherited permissions as explicit permissions
.In Windows 10, it appears things changed again. @ravuya says that you might have to manually re-create some of the permissions, as the registry editor no longer offers this exact functionality directly. I don’t use Windows very much anymore, so I’ll defer to them:
On Win10, there is a button called “Disable Inheritance” that does the same thing as the checkbox mentioned in step 5. It is necessary to create new permissions just for
Registration
, instead of inheriting those permissions from an upstream registry key.
7. HitOK
in the ‘Advanced’ window.
8. Back in the first permissions window, click your user, and uncheckFull Control
.
-
Do the same thing for the
Administrators
group.
-
Hit
OK
orApply
.
Congratulations, you will never again be plagued by the registration nag, and just like WinRAR, your trial will never expire.
You may have to do the same thing for other (non-Visual C#) programs, like Visual Basic express or Visual C++ express.
It has been reported by @IronManMark20 in the comments that simply deleting the registry key works and that Visual Studio does not attempt to re-create the key. I am not sure if I believe this because when I installed VS on a clean windows installation, the key was not created until I ran VS at least once. But for what it’s worth, that may be an option as well.