Microsoft has announced a new version of its Visual Studio software and they are taking a bold step and offering the software for free. There is, however, one large catch: this version of the software cannot be used for the development of enterprise applications.
Visual Studio Community 2013 is the latest addition to the Visual Studio family for Microsoft. This community edition is a free, full-featured development environment designed for students, open source contributors, small companies, startups and individual developers.
This edition includes all the features needed to create non-enterprise applications across desktop, devices, cloud, web and services, including coding productivity features, cross-platform mobile development tools for Windows, iOS and Android, and full extensibility with access to thousands of extensions. In short, this is the perfect application to get you started in the world of development or to use to create your next big app.
This is a big step for Microsoft by offering a free version of their premier development tool for noncommercial use. By allowing anyone to have access to the application, it will help bolster the Microsoft development community and that is likely the intended reason for making the tool free.
This version is available now and you can find more information about this version of Visual Studio at the link below.
Download: Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition
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