As part of the Visual Studio 2019 16.6 update, we’ve introduced a set of new capabilities to improve your overall authentication experience. While these changes benefit all Visual Studio users, they are especially helpful if you need to work across Azure AD tenants that have enabled multi-factor authentication (MFA) policies. That’s because these improvements help preserve your authenticated state, which removes the need to re-enter your credentials outside your organization’s policy requirements.
With today’s demands for more secure environments, Conditional Access (CA) policies such as MFA have become more common place. Azure AD offers a wide range of CA policies to secure access to your resources, and while Visual Studio 2017 offered support for these policies, if you work across multiple MFA enabled tenants, you likely experienced the need to constantly re-enter your credentials inside Visual Studio. Today, I’ll show you how we’ve resolved the problem in the latest version of Visual Studio 2019.
System web browser authentication flow
Perhaps the most impactful change we made, is to allow you to use your system’s default web browser to authenticate your accounts. If you access resources across multiple tenants that enabled MFA policies, using this new flow should help minimize the need to re-enter credentials.
To enable this workflow, go to Visual Studio’s Options dialog (Tools > Options…), select the Accounts tab and pick System web browser under the Add and reauthenticate accounts using: dropdown:
Once the option is enabled, you can sign in or add accounts to Visual Studio as you normally would, via the Account Settings dialog (File > Account Settings…).
This action will open your system’s default web browser, ask you to sign into your account, and validate any pending MFA request.
While this will help minimize the need to re-enter your credentials, please note that Visual Studio may still prompt for credentials based on your company’s CA session management policies.
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