How to fix Authentication Problems for Visual Studio Online & Git

Visual Studio Online is a great service for developers. Not only do you get a whole Team Foundation Server for free, you also get a place to host your private Git repositories. As long as you use Visual Studio everything works as expected. However, that changes in the moment you try to use any other client (including GitHub for Windows). All you get with those clients is an authentication failure.

As it turns out, the single-sign on system you use with Visual Studio Online doesn’t work for Git. If you want to connect you need to create a different set of credentials. If you follow this tutorial, you will be able to use the Git client of your choice without any further problems.

 
Open http://www.visualstudio.com/ in the browser of your choice and log in. You will find your account on the right side of your overview page (don’t mix them up with your personal info at the left side):

VSOnline_Account

You are now in the control centre of Visual Studio Online, where you can see all your projects and the documentation. If you click on your name in the top right corner you will find the My profile link:

VSOnline_MyProfile

Click on My profile to open your user profile. When you open the credentials tab you should see something like this:

VSOnline_EnableCredentials

All that you now need to do is to click on the Enable alternate credentials link. The link will disappear and is replaced with a form to set your username and password:

VSOnline_SetCredentials

When you click on Save changes you should give Microsoft a few minutes to propagate your new credentials through all their systems.

From now on you can connect with every Git client to your Visual Studio Online account.

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