SSL/TLS error message when clicking Visual Studio "feedback" menu options

Question

A few weeks ago I noticed my Visual Studio Help->Send Feedback options stopped working. When I click one of them ("report a problem", "suggest a feature"), the "developer community" page opens in my browser but with the following error displayed in the middle of the window:

A second browser tab also opens saying "authenticating", and after several seconds displays the error "websocket timed out after 10 seconds". Sometimes it'll instead display a message with the title "Disconnected from Visual Studio" and a purple "launch without visual studio" button. This button is useless as although it lets me "manually" sign-in to the site, accessing the site this way doesn't permit you to report a VS issue, which is why I'm having to report it here in the hope that the right people see it!

Any thoughts on what the problem might be? These used to work fine and the problems only started a few weeks ago. I'm on a corporate network so is it possible something has been changed, and if so what could it be (so I can notify our IT dept)?

Interestingly it isn't a global issue as most of my colleagues are still able to use the VS feedback options without issue, yet I see the above problem on both of my PCs.

Answer 1

I have the same issue as the above and the mentioned suggestions do not fix this. Please could this issue be fixed.

I was trying to post problems with Visual Studio 2022 where errors are listed whereas I do not get these errors when running from a powershell script

Answer 2

Hello @Andrew Stephens,

Thank you for taking time to post this issue in Microsoft Q&A forum.

The error seems to be related to certificates(maybe some certificates are expired), authentication, cache or system/network environment.

As your colleagues are still able to use the VS feedback options without issue, I think the cause is not related to your corporate network, settings, or environment. The cause may be only on your specific machine(s).

Either contact your IT or check manually, you may need to consider the certificates. Open Edge, click Settings button, search certificates, click Mange certificates, find Untrusted Publishers tab, consider if you can try to remove the untrusted publisher(confirm with your IT/administrator before you remove anything), also check other tabs if it’s possible. After that, reboot your machine and test again.

About the cache, consider web browser cache and VS cache.

I think it’s easy for you to find and clean web browser cache. For example, for Edge, open Settings, on the left, click Cookies and site permissions, on the right, click “Manage and delete cookies and site data”, click “See all cookies and site data”, on top right, click Remove all(you might need to double confirm that the cookies and data are safe for you to remove, before you remove them).

For VS cache, try closing VS, renaming/removing following folders and restarting VS:

1. C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\VSCommon\OnlineLicensing.
2. C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\.IdentityService.

There’s an alternative method to report the issue => using the .NET entry, after you submit and report the issue, edit the tags and add visual studio related tags.

You can describe the issue that you got, and we can help you to submit a ticket if you still fail to report the issue.

Sincerely,

Tianyu

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