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Get Visual Studio Community 2013 for Free

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115 pointsaltaweelali98 comments

Important info:

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 > $1 Million US Dollars in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.

I didn't realize it was so permissive for businesses. They are pretty serious about loading up the pipeline.

It is less permissive than Express was though, isn't it? I was under the impression there were no restrictions on who could use Express. If Express goes away now, some organizations will be shut out of the Community Edition due to its licensing terms and have to pay.

If you're running a "non-enterprise" commercial development team with > 5 full time MS devs and you're building apps of any sort of complexity I suspect you won't be using the Express editions anyway. I'm one of two developers in a company of 12 and Express doesn't really cut the mustard for the stuff we're doing which is only moderately complex.

Also bear in mind you're still getting five free installs before having to shell out for your sixth developer. By that time I would also expect that your revenue stream is pretty healthy and the cost of developer tooling, relatively speaking, is a minor cost of doing business.

I work in a company that could be labelled as enterprise, thus I think I couldn't use the Community edition. The problem is that I'm not one of the developers (I am a sysadmin), but I had installed the Express edition in the past for example to simply compile some code that I found online (free).

Same happened in my past companies, "real" developers were using full blown VS but I was sometimes doing some small project (not as side project, small = "quick hack that I needed and developers had no time to do that")

If they stop releasing Express edition (that's not clear, I've not searched if Community will superseed Express or if they'll keep both) it will be impossible for me to do so.

Having said that, I think this fully featured Community edition is interesting

> In non-enterprise organizations, up to 5 users can use Visual Studio Community.

That's very sloppily worded. Is it 5 concurrent users? May 5 people create a product and 4 others (after delivery) maintain it?

I think the bigger issue would be knowing who is using it. One team might think we only have 5 people so we'll use it! And a different team in another office might think the same. Oops.

Yeah all this licensing mumbo-jumbo is what made me drop .NET from my stack and this is what's going to keep me from coming back.

I think that the statement above yours is trying to point out that they're simplifying the license.

If you have a grudge against MS, that's fine. But this isn't really confusing at all.

Is "Any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community to create their own free or paid apps" really that hard to understand? The other stuff reads as "if you have more than 250 PCs in your company, buy the damn thing." The exceptions they make are totally in developer's favor and proof that no matter what Microsoft does some people will bitch.

Have you ever looked into GPL? It's a tad longer than this.

Well, that is bound not to be the binding legal document here, there must be quite a long contract that actually defines the terms. Nothing to do with Microsoft necessarily, that's just how lawyers are.

"Microsoft killed my pappy. And my pappy's pappy."

I think VS Community Edition is great, but what I think is mindblowingly amazing is that it's free "for contributing to open source projects".

(Disclaimer: Microsoft employee.)

That was definitely an eyebrow raiser. Here's to hoping you guys keep this sort of thing up.

The 250 users / $1 million revenue thing is a bit weird. Any tech company with more than 10 employees probably has upwards of $1 million/year in revenue. The salary bill alone will be pushing that quite quickly. There seems to be a huge disparity between 250 PCs and $1 million annual revenue. If you had 250 PCs with less than $1 million annual revenue you'd be paying each employee less than $4000 a year.

Those estimates don't have to hold outside US and west EU.

Or you could just be losing a lot of money!

That's why the license said "revenue" and not "profit", just to make sure you need to pay for it, even if your company play some weird tax tricks and has minimal or no profit each year.

There are startups with 5-50 employees that have no revenue. I think the $1 million covers "established business", and 250 PCs covers "really well funded startup".

250 PCs also covers lots of businesses who have 250 knowledge workers who do not do development, and one or two developers supporting them.

I suspect there are a number of businesses successfully using Express today who are going to have to pay up for MSDN / Professional licenses, assuming Express goes away.

It's not clear to me how this applies to agencies/development shops. Say small agency (< 10 developers) writing apps for their clients, some of which are enterprises.

For small agency(non-enterprise org), only 5 developers can use VS community edition.

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.

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.

I for one approve of this trend.

Staya Nadella might be accelerating things, but Microsoft has been moving through this direction before Staya's arrival (ASP.NET MVC was open sourced in April 2009), actually I see Staya Nadella taking reins as another step Microsoft took to be more open.

> Staya Nadella might be accelerating things, but Microsoft has been moving through this direction before Staya's arrival (ASP.NET MVC was open sourced in April 2009),

Satya Nadella has been a Microsoft exec since 2007, so events in 2009 are not before his arrival, and he was credited for being instrumental in driving this kind of transition in focus before becoming CEO.

> actually I see Staya Nadella taking reins as another step Microsoft took to be more open.

Sure, it was a vote to double down on the things Nadella was driving as a key leader before becoming CEO.

Scott Hanselman has been an outspoken advocate for this type of move within Microsoft. Hard to say how much influence he has had, but I think it's probably not insignificant.

And as I mentioned in another comment, Scott Guthrie. He really seemed to give the Dev Div a boot up the backside when he took over.

The SDXC card format specifies exFAT as a mandatory feature - a proprietary, patent-encumbered filesystem from Microsoft. This makes it very difficult to legally support these SD cards in Open Source operating systems.

When they stop pulling crap like that, maybe I'll believe in the "new Microsoft".

Get used to it

Agreed. I'm still far from being a fan, but it's definitely a move in the right direction.

This movement with Microsoft has been going on long before Satya took over the reins. I'd say Scott Guthrie probably seeded this goal to become more open (-source) around 2007/8. It's taken a while to achieve because...lawyers.

My impression is that it's taken a while to achieve primarily because of leadership roadblocks, which Nadella changed.

I've heard this from MSFT employees and I believe Ballmer made a post-retirement comment in an interview about the same: that this all started after he left.

Oh I totally agree that upper management roadblocks slowed things down and that Nadella is a breath of fresh air compared to Ballmer (though I do have a soft spot for the man). But the seeds were sown by division staff such as Guthrie (and Hanselmann, Phil Haack etc) as far back as 2007, long before Nadella became a rising star, this isn't all as a result of Nadella's Perestroika and Glasnost. That said there may have been informal conversations between Guthrie and Nadella over the years speculating as to how they could change direction.

http://www.wired.com/2011/11/how-microsoft-learned-to-stop-w... this article actually gives a very good information about how things started to change.

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.

Essentially, they just made Pro version free for small companies and individual developers, and open source of all size.

This is a surprising move, won't it result in a large drop in their MSDN subscriber base?

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.

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.

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.

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 using Visual Studio anyways.

Where I work has 5x complimentary MSDN Premium licenses care of whatever partnership level we have with MS.

So if they lost us to the community edition they'd lose $0. (And probably end up saving money, since no Azure developer credits.)

The main value of an MSDN subscription is all the subscriber downloads and the Azure credits you get.

Want to try out or develop against any piece of MS software, just download it from the MSDN portal and off you go. Want to test out provisioning with Azure or fire up a server to test or dev against, just use your Azure credits. You can happily run a couple of small servers with the Azure credits.

If you just want Visual Studio you could always buy it on its own for much less than a subscription.

I get bugger all Azure credits with Pro. £35 a month which isn't enough to spin up one VM with 1.75Gb of RAM for a month...

If I grab MAPS sub and VS community I'm well up on cash.

£35 a month will get you four A0 Windows/Linux instances or a single Linux A1 and a single Windows/Linux A0 running full time for the month.

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/details/virtual-mac...

Yeah I know. The A0 with windows server is painful. If I got an A1 for £30 I'd break even on renting a dedicated box. That's the big pain.

"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.

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. "

I found BizSpark's barrier to entry, practically zero. I applied online and got accepted within hours. I just graduated last month. I never got bothered by Microsoft during the whole membership and exiting was pain free. My experience with the program has been wholly different than yours.

I was just questioning a facet of BizSpark. Taken as a whole, it's a great program.

My point was how Visual Studio Community 2013 enhances BizSpark by rendering that particular complaint moot.

My guess is that they will soon introduce Xamarin into the MSDN subscription plans. Hook developers with the free tools, and then sell the cross-platform, mobile capabilities of Xamarin as an upgrade. There is already a 20% discount for MSDN premium and ultimate subscribers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Anyone knows if there's a way to avoid that? I'd like to have "just an IDE", for node and web development.

I set up a VirtualBox instance of Windows 7 with VS 2013 CE - it took up close to 30 gig with nothing else installed.

Visual Studio express comes in different editions, so it's unlikely that Visual C# Express installed Visual BASIC, as that was what Visual BASIC Express is. And running the Express for Web 2013 installer says it will use less than 1GB of disk space.

What that out of the way, within five seconds of clicking the link here it computed 7GB of disk space. It did not provide options to ignore subcomponents like the full VS 2013/4.

My experience is that the MS tools stuff installs and uninstalls cleanly -- and what little it leaves behind are some system components that I'd prefer to have updated and left around anyway. If this freaks you out then that's what VMs are for.

> Anyone knows if there's a way to avoid that? I'd like to have "just an IDE", for node and web development.

Sorry to reply on a tangent, but for that sort of development I feel compelled to chip in and recommend WebStorm. It's not free, but ships with a boatload of features that are perfect for NodeJS/WebDev. Like a reverse-debugger that you can use on your serverside as well as front-end code. A real time-saver.

http://blog.jetbrains.com/webstorm/2014/04/spy-js-webstorm-s...

I know WebStorm, thanks, wanna try the competition :)

Nodeclipse[1] is pretty good for doing node/web development. It supports Node/Angular/ExpressJS and many other little bits and pieces out of the box.

[1] http://www.nodeclipse.org/

Every single edition of VS I have ever tried(and I worked with every one beginning with 6 all the way to 2012) had an option to uncheck SQL Server during installation. Granted, I have not worked with the Express editions,but I don't see why it would be any different.

Welcome to the Mickysoft BloatWorld. And do not forget to get the new 700+ MB Update, so you can live up to even more bloat - this update alone flatulated 5+ GB on the harddrives I have seen.

This is not just about "style" or "personal preference", it is a serious problem: it eats too much energy and therefore destroys the planet, millions of old but perfectly usable devices are transformed into highly dangerous toxic waste because Windows 8x is too slow for them and - most important - we loose a whole generation of brains as too many young developers grow up in the perception that this kind of bloat is acceptable, what is a real catastrophe for the whole industry - it is so hard to find people that can program without crutches and really know what they are doing.

We should more actively avoid this bloat and support better alternatives.

Yes, Mickysoft jobs pay the bills for many, but this happened because we tolerated this too long and alternatives were too weak. Nowadays it is possible to replace all the legacy MS waste that still exists in many companies with better solutions.

The hate is strong with this one.. To the point it's blinding and making it hard to write a company's name properly :P

I'll bite the troll in the off chance you're serious.

Wait, Open Source is magically free of bloatware? OpenOffice, Firefox, KDE?

Try running a modern Linux desktop distro like Ubuntu on a 10 year old machine or a 5 year old netbook. Open ten tabs with sites like Gmail, YouTube etc. in Firefox on that machine and then get back to us.

And since Windows 7, the minimum requirements have been steady and boot time has been pretty fast.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html

It pays the bills because it solves problems.

I run windows on a 4 year old thinkpad. It's 8.1 on an i5. It goes like lightning and the battery lasts twice as long as Ubuntu does on the same kit even after powertop has been frigged with.

Also my wife's android handset has 25% more battery capacity than my Lumia 630 and lasts half as long.

YMMV but what you state is not factual and merely a slashdot-esque troll.

During installation you can choose a customize path and un-check everything you dont need.

http://i.stack.imgur.com/Evju1.png

There are checkboxes to not install SQL, MFC libraries and friends. It makes it a 9GB vs. 10GB install, according to its stated amount, I didn't check actual usage.

I compared the Win32_Products that are installed before and after. Even with all checkboxes unchecked, the installer adds 100+ packages. Unfortunately most of these are not listed in the add/remove programs control panel.

Previous comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8595948

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..

What's the best option for getting Windows and running it in a VM? I have a Mac but would like to try Visual Studio.

VirtualBox, but you will still need to buy Windows with license.

Or wait for Windows 10 when it'll be free for personal users.

> Or wait for Windows 10 when it'll be free for personal users.

Do you have any reference for this ? Will Microsoft release Windows 10 for free for individuals ?

Here's a written reference: http://news.filehippo.com/2014/10/windows-10-will-free-perso...

I believe it was also mentioned in the Windows 10 announcement keynote.

The Windows 10 preview that's out right now works well enough for casual use today. I've been running it on my laptop since it was available and have had a few minor issues, but haven't had any real trouble using it as my primary machine outside the office.

If you are still in school you could join their Dreamspark program and get Windows 8 free of charge. If you don't qualify for that you can still get a free developer token by simply joining: https://devcenterbenefits.windows.com

You could use one of the trial versions Microsoft offers:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-8...

If you just want to try, test VMs are available here:

https://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools

Parallels works well. I do development in Visual Studio using it and it works pretty well.

Parallels with a Bootcamp partition.

Parellels works great for me, coding C# professionally for 6 months now. It'll make your MacBook fan run a bit here and there, but no biggie.

How is this different from Express versions?

The new version is extensible, so you can get access to the over 5,100 extensions in the Visual Studio ecosystem.[1]

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).

[1] https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/

AFAIK, you cannot install extensions or plugins (e.g. ReSharper) in Express version(s).

Yeah, this seems to be the major difference. The question for me now is if they'll kill off the Express edition for the next release.

Besides what is referred in sibling posts:

- DirectX debugging tools, including GPGPU

- Parallel code debugging

- MFC and ATL for those that still need to support such type of applications

- 64 bit compilers

- DDK integration

- Sharepoint integration

"Debug / Attach to process" is another really significant feature that Community Edition has that was omitted from Express

Also templates for Windows Services and other project types that aren't included with the express versions.

It's Visual Studio Professional with a different license. Previously you'd have paid through the nose for Visual Studio Pro, now it's free (subject to license conditions).

Also, all languages (C++, C#, Basic) in one IDE. The Express versions have one language each.

> The Express versions have one language each.

That was true of most of them through 2010 (though the 2008/2010 Web Developer Express supported, IIRC, at least C# and VB.NET as backend languages.), but not the 2012/2013 versions.

The VS2012/2013 Express Editions are not language specific, but project type specific -- the 2012 editions were "for Web", "for Windows 8" (i.e., Metro/Modern UI), "for Windows Desktop", and "for Windows Phone". 2013 merged "for Windows 8" and "for Windows Phone" into "for Windows".

does this require a particular version of the .net framework to be installed?

Pretty sure it will install .net 4.5 if you don't have it already during installation.

Yes. All pre-requisites will be downloaded during install.

not sure if Dephi (Embarcadero) would do the same?

their download button points to an .exe file, no matter with OS are you running

It's a Windows application though, what are you going to do with it if you can't run exe?

Exactly. They don't even care of hiding that button for others OS

Also, why the hate?

That's free as in price, not as in freedom.

Sure, I'll have a free beer, thank you!

Another bloatware from MS :) Seriously... I crawls even on Windows... which you need to buy! ;)

I haven't realized hackernews makes comments even harder to read once they get enough downvotes. Thanks for writing the lowest rated comment I've seen so far :D

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