Publish a bug report to Visual Studio Online anonymously

Question

Is it possible to publish bug reports directly to Visual Studio Online without having a Visual Studio Online account?

My idea would be that, when a crash of the application happens, the "fail" screen shows an option to send the bug report. I would like this bug report to be automatically added to Visual Studio Online.

I can't seem to find a good up-to-date information about APIs for Visual Studio Online.

I'm also a bit lost about what a "user" of Visual Studio Online is. Is there a way to create "a work-item only user"? In the "standard" TFS those users usually don't need a CAL to access TFS.

If not, it means that all my app testers will use a license for Visual Studio Online, meaning that after the 5 free users, I'll have to pay ~40 USD for someone who will just input bugs/work items?

Answer 1

Each user who needs to login to a Visual Studio Online account will need to have a user plan associated to them (including the free Basic plan allotments) or an MSDN subscription to access the account. We don't have the ability to have anonymous users login to a Visual Studio Online account (or for Team Foundation Server either).

You are right that there is a difference today between Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Online which allows a "work item only view" on-premises that isn't matched in Visual Studio Online. That access level is called Limited for TFS on-premises instead of Standard. The Standard access level does require a TFS CAL. It's something we are currently exploring now.

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Update

Visual Studio Online (and Team Foundation Server Update 4) now allows an unlimited number of stakeholders to have full access to work item tracking for free. This stakeholder license replaces and expands the original Work Item Only View capabilities.

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For your testers, the best option for them would actually be Visual Studio Test Professional with MSDN or the new MSDN Platforms offering. This provides them the ability to access Microsoft Test Manager (in the first case) and the web test case management capabilities (in both cases) and allows you to file rich actionable bugs reports.

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Update

Visual Studio Online has also been updated to provide the ability to execute test cases as part of the Basic license now. This will be most useful for user acceptance testers who aren't participating in test planning & test authoring but have been assigned a set of test cases to execute.

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For your question about up-to-date API information for Visual Studio Online - it is the same documentation as the the TFS SDK at the moment. You can use the TFS SDK to build extensions for both Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Online.