Last week Microsoft finalized its latest Visual Studio release, making it available for MSDN subscribers, along with downloads for the new free Community edition. It’s an interesting release, one that reflects changes in both the way Microsoft is building its own apps and in where the rest of the industry is moving.
I first wrote about Visual Studio in the 1990s. Over the years I've learned that Microsoft’s development tooling offers an interesting guide to the way Microsoft thinks about application development -- and how Redmond is writing code. Visual Studio 2015 in particular shows how serious Microsoft is about supporting new patterns and practices developers are adopting today.
Openness in practice
Visual Studio Community Edition. A new free edition of Visual Studio - Visual Studio Community 2013 edition is a full-featured IDE. It supports multiple project types in one solution file in a single IDE, and has all of the productivity features and IDE extensibility capabilities (meaning you can use Xamarin, ReSharper, VsVim, and any other VSIX extension) that developers love in Visual Studio. Visual Studio Enterprise is an integrated, end-to-end solution for teams of any size with demanding quality and scale needs. Whether it’s for a phone, desktop, or the cloud, Visual Studio makes it easier to build great software on PC and Mac. For info, my Dad has just downloaded the Visual Studio Community 2015 on his PC (using the same link as me) and he also gets the vs_community.exe. When he double clicks the file it launches a full install. I will be able to use the tool on his PC but would prefer to have it on my Mac. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Drill into Visual Studio 2015 and you’ll find tooling for many modern platforms, not only for Microsoft .Net languages. There’s Python support, Node.js tooling, and cross-platform mobile support for Apache Cordova.
Visual Studio For Mac
Microsoft’s open source .Net Core is also supported, so you can build cross-platform server apps running on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS. Web applications built with ASP.Net 5 will use .Net Core, with platform-specific APIs available as downloadable packages. Because .Net Core itself is granular, you don’t have to download an entire framework, only the packages you need for your current application.
That cross-platform approach isn’t for server-side code alone. It’s also for client applications. Visual Studio now supports development of cross-platform C++ libraries that run on iOS and Android (KitKat and Lollipop). Apps built in Visual Studio can run natively on both platforms, though you’ll need a Mac to build iOS code. You don’t need to use Microsoft’s own compiler because Visual Studio now also supports the popular, open Clang and LLVM compilers, as well as GCC. Adding the third-party Xamarin tools to Visual Studio gives you support for more devices, including the Apple Watch.
Bundled templates simplify building cross-platform apps, and code can be used in Xamarin apps. Perhaps more usefully, Microsoft provides a set of Android emulators, so you can debug code without leaving Visual Studio. It’s worth taking advantage of Visual Studio’s NuGet tooling to download additional tooling for your apps, including Ionic templates for use with Cordova.
The behemoth extends
Even with the renaissance of the programmer’s editor, there’s still a role for a heavyweight IDE like Visual Studio. Projects in Visual Studio can take in all the elements of a modern application, from multiple mobile devices to IoT endpoints to microservices to the cloud. Support for Microsoft’s cloud-hosted Visual Studio Online also means it’s possible to integrate with GitHub and to target multiple OSes, building iOS and Android apps alongside Windows.
Extensibility remains an important Visual Studio feature, and with the new Community edition replacing the older Express versions, independent and hobbyist developers now get access to the same tooling as Professional and Enterprise developers. That means they can use NuGet to download add-ons, as well as get access to more of the debugging and code intelligence built into Visual Studio (including elements of the new .Net Roslyn compiler).
It’s not only applications, it’s also the techniques we’re using to build modern applications. Microservices and APIs are key elements in building scalable cloud applications. It’s not surprising to see that service developers can use a NuGet library to work with the Swagger API description language inside Visual Studio, consuming and creating service descriptions before writing the code that works with and behind those APIs.
Talking to members of the Visual Studio product team, it’s clear that cross-platform development was a key design consideration. It’s a journey that began when Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was running the company’s Cloud and Enterprise group, but became more visible when he took over from Steve Ballmer, branching out from a relatively narrow ecosystem. Technologies like Cordova and cross-platform C++ are only the visible part of the iceberg. It’s the code that developers are writing that really matters.
Feeding the IoT frenzy
There’s also a bigger picture: the millions of new devices that need code. The Internet of things is a huge opportunity for developers and for good development tooling, as hardware and software transition from maker hacks to full-blown products.
A few weeks ago, at Maker Faire in San Mateo, we were hearing about go-to-market processes for hardware from silicon vendors. With the IoT tooling in Visual Studio 2015, Microsoft aims to provide a similar path for software, with recent announcements, including a partnership with connected hardware vendor Particle.
As John Montgomery, partner director of program management in the Microsoft Developer Division, points out, the difficulty lies in getting the services IoT devices need to run at scale. For one thing, architectural issues arise, especially when working with devices that use gateways. By providing an open development environment that works from cloud to device, Montgomery thinks that Visual Studio can help close gaps, supporting relatively dumb things with rich protocols to deliver data to services.
There’s a lot to like in this latest Visual Studio. It’s clear that Microsoft is using it to push developers toward building more modern applications, with support for cloud-centric design patterns and for cross-platform mobile endpoints for applications and services. If Visual Studio 2015 really indicates the next few years of developer thinking at Microsoft, we’re in for a very interesting time.
What's missing in Visual Studio Community 2015? They say it's full-featured and free, but if that's the case, then why do/will they still sell Visual Studio Ultimate 2015 or Visual Studio Enterprise 2015 for 6 grand?
Something is missing in the Community preview, right? And why is it called 'Community'? My code won't be synced across your devices like the new Windows 10 update system is, will it? (Kind of joking about that last part, and kind of not, too).
NDEIGUNDEIGU4 Answers
Check the following: https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/compare/Visual studio community is free version for students and other academics, individual developers, open-source projects, and small non-enterprise teams (see 'Usage' section at bottom of linked page). While VSUltimate is for companies. You also get more things with paid versions!
Carl WalshThere are 2 major differences.
- Technical
- Licensing
Technical, there are 3 major differences:
First and foremost, Community doesn't have TFS support.
You'll just have to use git (arguable whether this constitutes a disadvantage or whether this actually is a good thing).
Note: This is what MS wrote. Actually, you can check-in&out with TFS as normal, if you have a TFS server in the network. You just cannot use Visual Studio as TFS SERVER.
Second, VS Community is severely limited in its testing capability.
Only unit tests. No Performance tests, no load tests, no performance profiling.
Third, VS Community's ability to create Virtual Environments has been severely cut.
On the other hand, syntax highlighting, IntelliSense, Step-Through debugging, GoTo-Definition, Git-Integration and Build/Publish are really all the features I need, and I guess that applies to a lot of developers.
For all other things, there are tools that do the same job faster, better and cheaper.
If you, like me, anyway use git, do unit testing with NUnit, and use Java-Tools to do Load-Testing on Linux plus TeamCity for CI, VS Community is more than sufficient, technically speaking.
Licensing:
A) If you're an individual developer (no enterprise, no organization), no difference (AFAIK), you can use CommunityEdition like you'd use the paid edition (as long as you don't do subcontracting)
B) You can use CommunityEdition freely for OpenSource (OSI) projects
C) If you're an educational insitution, you can use CommunityEdition freely (for education/classroom use)
D) If you're an enterprise with 250 PCs or users or more than one million US dollars in revenue (including subsidiaries), you are NOT ALLOWED to use CommunityEdition.
E) If you're not an enterprise as defined above, and don't do OSI or education, but are an 'enterprise'/organization, with 5 or less concurrent (VS) developers, you can use VS Community freely (but only if you're the owner of the software and sell it, not if you're a subcontractor creating software for a larger enterprise, software which in the end the enterprise will own), otherwise you need a paid edition.
The above does not consitute legal advise.
See also:
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/262916/understanding-visual-studio-community-edition-license
Stefan SteigerVisual Studio Community is same (almost) as professional edition. What differs is that VS community do not have TFS features, and the licensing is different. As stated by @Stefan.
The different versions on VS are compared here - https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/compare-visual-studio-2015-products-vs
YogiYogiVisual Studio For Mac 2015
All these answers are partially wrong.
Microsoft has clarified that Community is for ANY USE as long as your revenue is under $1 Million US dollars. That is literally the only difference between Pro and Community. Corporate or free or not, irrelevant.
Even the lack of TFS support is not true. I can verify it is present and works perfectly.
EDIT: Here is an MSDN post regarding the $1M limit: MSDN (hint: it's in the VS 2017 license)
EDIT: Even over the revenue limit, open source is still free.
protected by Community♦Mar 2 '17 at 8:40
Thank you for your interest in this question. Because it has attracted low-quality or spam answers that had to be removed, posting an answer now requires 10 reputation on this site (the association bonus does not count).
Would you like to answer one of these unanswered questions instead?