Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition - free for individuals and teams of five

By Vasudev Ram

Just saw this via a thread on Hacker News (HN):

Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition now available (visualstudio.com) (HN thread)

(Also, just saw a TechCrunch article about Visual Studio Community Edition.)

Excerpt from the TechCrunch article:

[ It’s basically a full version of Visual Studio with no restrictions, except that you can’t use it in an enterprise setting and for teams with more than five people (you can, however, use it for any other kind of commercial and non-commercial project). ]

UPDATE: New HN thread in which this news about Visual Studio Community edition is just a subset: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform.

Excerpt from that article:

[ NEW YORK — Nov. 12, 2014 — On Wednesday, Microsoft Corp. reinforced its commitment to cross-platform developer experiences by open sourcing the full server-side .NET stack and expanding .NET to run on the Linux and Mac OS platforms.
...
Delivering on its promise to support cross-platform development, Microsoft is providing the full .NET server stack in open source, including ASP.NET, the .NET compiler, the .NET Core Runtime, Framework and Libraries, enabling developers to build with .NET across Windows, Mac or Linux. Through this implementation, Microsoft will work closely with the open source community, taking contributions for future improvements to .NET and will work through the .NET Foundation. ]

Whew! That's pretty big news if it all works out the way they say.

HN thread about the open sourcing of .NET (with over 425 comments, when I first saw it)

The actual site for Visual Studio Community Edition.

Excerpts from the post:

[ Tools: Designers, editors, debuggers, profilers - all packaged up in a single environment.

Languages: Code in C++, Python, HTML5, JavaScript, and of course C#, VB, and F#.

Why this news is of interest to Pythonistas is because the edition supports Python as a language, my guess is, via the add-on or plugin called Python Tools for Visual Studio, about which I've read some good reviews, including one by Scott Hanselman, a while ago; also interesting news because of that fact that if you're an individual or a small team of up to five people, you can develop both free and paid applications using this edition of Visual Studio. And finally, they say that is not a limited version like the Visual Studio Express Editions, but a full version of Visual Studio.

Web: Extensive web tooling for ASP.NET, Node.js, and JavaScript.

And from their Q&A:

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.

(There are other terms for companies - check the above site and the TechCrunch article.) ]

I've used Visual Studio products at various times in the past, and this looks interesting. Going to check it out, and will report here in another post if I find anything interesting.

Here is the Wikipedia page for Visual Studio. It has already been updated for the news about the Community Edition.

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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