Well planned box, execution also great, however installing Visual Studio is never fun…. some of us don’t have that much HDD space to keep a Win VM around for HTB 
My cryptic hints:
Foothold: it’s right in front of your eyes, expired doesn’t mean useless. Be quick.
User: enumerate
Root: What can you do? What to do if you can’t spawn a 2nd window in command line?
Hit me up for a nudge if you need to 