Beware of the Microsoft Account!

The introduction of the Microsoft Account as an identification method on Windows 8 is great, it enables several scenarios in a seamless way and it makes life easy for users.

But there’s a downside over there: some services won’t work as the required impersonation (there’s always going to be a “shadow user” of your Microsoft Accounton your pc) is not allowed to be done from a security perspective.

This leads to problems in particular with Visual Studio Team Lab Management, where a massive usage of the impersonation is done in order to use the Lab features.

In my case, I verified tons of troubles when, with a Standard Environment made of workgroup machines. In this case, the installation of the required agents inside the machines always failed, with no particular reason (and without a real error!):

Obviously I don’t want to manually install anything, so the solution is to use another Windows Account (warning: a local Windows Account) as the Lab Service Account:

That’s it