Important info:<p>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.<p>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 > $1 Million US Dollars in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.
A lot of people seem to think that steps like this are just Microsoft catching up. Which, I suppose, they are. But there's something else here too - this kind of thing, where Microsoft is opening up to the open source community, releasing more free tools, releasing more open source projects, all started happening when Satya Nadella took the reins.<p>I think what we're looking at is a CEO that gets it and is trying to move as fast as possible to turn the monolithic company around. That's no mean feat, considering how long Microsoft has gone with everything being behind closed doors in a licensing maze.<p>I for one approve of this trend.
I've been using VS 2013 Community for a few days now, for C#/MVC work. I can't see the difference in relation to the paid version. All the features I habitually make use of are available. A very nice surprise.
This is a surprising move, won't it result in a large drop in their MSDN subscriber base?<p>I may be wrong here, but as far as I can tell, the only reason to maintain an MSDN subscription for the purposes of Visual Studio (assuming you're eligible to use Visual Studio Community 2013) is if you want the features in editions beyond Professional, you want to be on the bleeding edge, or you want the peripheral perks of subscribing.<p>Personally I think it's a fantastic decision, I'm just surprised Microsoft is actually doing it. Hopefully they will be timely in releasing a Community edition for future versions of Visual Studio.<p>Also, this move is pretty great for startups. I think it also puts BizSpark in a better position. Most early stage startups will no longer have to jump through hoops trying to get into BizSpark, nor prematurely start the clock ticking on that until they're ready.<p>One of my major peeves with BizSpark has been the requirement that your company's public-facing site be more than just a "Coming Soon" page. While I can see the reasoning, it's kind of annoying when you haven't launched yet, you'd prefer to focus on your product, and you want to make said site <i>using Visual Studio</i> anyways.
Should msvc be the go-to compiler on Windows for C++? I was getting back into the language and was quickly reminded of all the compiler and dependency hazzle, especially when coding for several operating systems. On top of that some older solutions aren't even a good idea anymore, like the whole mingw vs mingw-w64 crap.<p>Seems to me that from a precompiled binary and build management perspective it's just the easiest way to use whatever is best supported on each platform. Which seems to be clang on MacOS, gcc/clang on Linux and msvc on Windows.<p>I had to use chromiumembeddedframework in one project and compiling it with gcc or clang on Windows isn't even a choice. Even if there is a way to get it to work, it's a huge project that takes quite a lot of resources to build. Even if it was easy, prebuild is still a lot faster.<p>With the newest version always beeing free and tools like CMake beeing able to generate projects the only downside I can see is that msvc would dictate the features I'm able to use.
In my previous experiences with VS Express the installed version took about 10GBs of disk space and included plenty of stuff I didn't want or cared about, like various versions of MS SQL Server, support for VB, different runtimes for .NET, etc.<p>Anyone knows if there's a way to avoid that? I'd like to have "just an IDE", for node and web development.
I have often wondered why Microsoft wouldn't just release all versions of VS for free. VS is arguably the go-to tool for developing on the other paid Microsoft products (SQL Server, Azure), so it makes sense that this would attract MORE people to those paid offerings..