Solution: "You cannot use this account for this purpose because it belongs to an organization. Please choose a different account or sign up for a new one." when trying to signing to a Visual Studio Team Services project from within Visual Studio

I just spent way too much time trying to login to a VSTS instance from VS. Turns out to have something to do with how Microsoft Account is configured in Visual Studio. So, if you get this error:

“You cannot use this account for this purpose because it belongs to an organization. Please choose a different account or sign up for a new one.”

[

Open a cmd prompt as administrator and run the following:

For VS2015

 reg add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\14.0\TeamFoundation /v LegacyMSA /t REG_SZ /d True

For VS2013

reg add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0\TeamFoundation /v LegacyMSA /t REG_SZ /d True

Restart VS and try to signin again.

You should now see this auth dialog

[

Jon