Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2013 (replaces the Express edition)

[Arthur]

This looks far better than the old Express edition.

 

Website / Download / Blog

 

Great apps require great tools, and today we are opening up access to Visual Studio to an even broader set of developers.

 

Visual Studio Community 2013 is a new free, fully-featured edition of Visual Studio that lets developers target any platform, from desktop and mobile to web and cloud. Visual Studio Community 2013 also supports full Visual Studio extensibility, offering access to the ecosystem of over 5000 extensions.

 

In addition to broad platform support in a unified Visual Studio experience, Visual Studio Community 2013 also includes dozens of great Visual Studio tools, including Peek, Blend, Code Analysis, Graphical Debugging and full C# refactoring.

 

Support for Visual Studio extensibility means developers gain access to tools for a wide variety of technologies and platforms supported by the rich Visual Studio extensibility ecosystem, including the Visual Studio Gallery. For example, Visual Studio Community users have access to the excellent Visual Studio Tools for Unity and the open source Node.js Tools for Visual Studio and Web Essentials for Visual Studio.

 

Opening up access to Visual Studio extensibility to a wider audience also creates great new opportunities for extension authors to build new tools and experiences on top of the Visual Studio platform. For both open source and commercial extension authors, Visual Studio offers a great developer tools platform.

 

And most importantly, Visual Studio Community 2013 is free for any non-enterprise application development.

 

Developers can now use the breadth Microsoft’s tools and services for free with Visual Studio Community 2013 tools for developing applications from mobile and desktop to web and cloud, Azure Free Trial providing hosting for 10 websites + 10 mobile services and Visual Studio Online offering developer services free for up to 5 users. You can get started with all three offers today.

 

 

Q: Who can use Visual Studio Community?

A: Here’s how individual developers can use Visual Studio Community:

• Any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community to create their own free or paid apps.
  

Here’s how Visual Studio Community can be used in organizations:

• An unlimited number of users within an organization can use Visual Studio Community for the following scenarios: in a classroom learning environment, for academic research, or for contributing to open source projects.
  
• For all other usage scenarios: In non-enterprise organizations, up to 5 users can use Visual Studio Community. In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or > $1MM in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.
  

Q: How does Visual Studio Community 2013 compare to other Visual Studio editions?

A: Visual Studio Community 2013 includes all the great functionality of Visual Studio Professional 2013, designed and optimized for individual developers, students, open source contributors, and small teams.

 

Edited November 13, 2014 by Arthur

[LosOjos]

I wonder if they'll continue to give free licenses for Pro edition to students? Looks like this covers everything anyway, I just wonder what "designed and optimized for individual developers, students, open source contributors, and small teams" equates to in terms of differences...