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It's only available in the Enterprise version, which is well beyond the budget of most.

https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/news/releasenotes/vs2017-...

Some Microsoft Partner tiers give you 5-10 MSDN Enterprise subscriptions. I think Gold ISV gives you 25.

https://partner.microsoft.com/en-AU/membership/msdn-subscrip...

The registration fee is something like $2K.

There are various competencies you need to demonstrate to become a partner, but there's enough diversity between them that most businesses with Microsoft tech somewhere in the stack could become a partner.

If you are an ISV producing code that runs using Microsoft tech on Windows, it is not particularly difficult at all to qualify as at least a Silver-level partner. It's kind of a PITA to run your applications through the verification process every couple of years, but it's not hard, more tedious; or you can get a couple people to pass some of the certification tests.

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