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Q & A on Visual Studio Community 2013 and 2015 Preview

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You must have tons of questions on the newly announced Visual Studio Community 2013, Visual Studio 2015 Preview, and Visual Studio 2013 update 4, here are some of the Q&A which may help.

Visual Studio Community 2013

 

Q: What is Visual Studio Community 2013?  

A: Visual Studio Community 2013 is a free full-featured IDE for developers building apps across devices, desktops, and the cloud. The community edition includes all the capabilities needed for a student, open source contributor, or small team to create compelling applications – powerful productivity features, cross-platform mobile tools for Windows, iOS, and Android, as well as access to extensions.

 

Q: Does this mean Visual Studio Express editions go away?  

A: Existing versions of Visual Studio Express (e.g. 2010, 2013) will remain, but we’re not currently planning to release an Express edition in the 2015 wave. The community edition will become our first and best free offering for developers creating non-enterprise apps.

 

Q: Isn’t Visual Studio Community really just Visual Studio Professional?  

A: While the two editions share the same features today, the licensing terms determine who can use this product. We continue to invest in our paid offerings including MSDN subscription benefits and services, which many Visual Studio Professional users can take advantage of today.

 

Q: How will Microsoft monetize this move?  

A: This move is about providing developers with tools that empower them to build modern, competitive apps in today’s marketplace – whether those apps are free, paid, academic, or open source.

 

Q: What does this mean for MSDN subscribers of Visual Studio Professional?  

A: Visual Studio Professional with MSDN subscribers will continue to receive all the benefits of their MSDN subscription, including software, training, and credits for Azure cloud services, Visual Studio Online as well as the new e-Learning benefits we announced today.

 

Q: How will you regulate people who use this SKU? What are the guidelines?   How do you define “non-enterprise app”?  

A: Here’s a quick summary of how to think about usage (please refer to the EULA within the product for specific terms, and to the Visual Studio Licensing whitepaper for more guidance):

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

 

Q: What are the specific features of the Visual Studio Community 2013?  

A: Visual Studio Community 2013 shares the same features as Visual Studio Professional 2013 today and licensing terms determine who can use this product. Based on the target audience for this product, SharePoint, Office, LightSwitch and Cloud Business Applications are not included in the installation.

 

Q: Will current Visual Studio extensions work for Visual Studio Community 2013?  

A: Yes, any extension that’s compatible with Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 should work with Visual Studio Community 2013.

 

Q: Can you install Visual Studio Community 2013 and Visual Studio 2013 Pro+ on the same machine?

A: No, you cannot install Visual Studio Community if you have Visual Studio Professional 2013 or above installed on that machine. If you’ve installed Visual Studio Community first, and then install a higher level edition, Visual Studio Community will be upgraded to (replaced by) that edition.

 

Q: Can you install Visual Studio Community 2013 and Visual Studio Express editions on the same machine?

A: Yes.

 

Visual Studio 2015 Preview

 

What is new with Visual Studio 2015 Preview?

A: Visual Studio 2015 Preview contains many new features, updates to existing features and is further extended with additional releases coming out November 12th.

Below you’ll find some highlights of features across core categories:

· Cross-platform mobile development

· Tooling for Apache Cordova™ – Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova, which were previously released for Visual Studio 2013 are now built into Visual Studio 2015 Preview. With these tools you can create hybrid cross-platform mobile apps that are powered by the Apache Cordova™ framework and work on iOS, Android and Windows, while at the same time taking advantage of the powerful Visual Studio IDE features such as breakpoint debugging, IntelliSense code editors and much more.

· Visual Studio Emulator for Android – Developers can now download an Emulator for Android that works with Visual Studio 2015 Preview. This new emulator, built by Microsoft is designed to be fast and reliable, easy to install and configure. It also enables developers to easily switch between different platform emulators without Hyper-V conflicts. To learn more and to download the emulator visit VS.com download page .

· Cross-platform Development using C++ – Developers can now use Visual Studio 2015 to share, reuse, build, deploy, and debug code for use in C++ cross-platform mobile projects. Developers can create projects from templates for Android Native Activity apps, or for shared code libraries that you can use on multiple platforms and in Xamarin native apps.

· Code Sharing Across Projects – Sharing code is a key component to any cross-platform project, and now developers working on Universal Windows using C# can use Shared Projects to reuse their code in Xamarin native apps, or in other projects such as WPF, ASP.NET and various other project types.

Web & Cloud development

· ASP.NET 5 Preview – Web developers can now use Visual Studio Visual Studio 2015 to create ASP.NET 5 Preview applications, which are built as a lean and composable .NET stack for building modern web applications for both cloud and on-premises servers.

· Improvements to Add Connected Services – Visual Studio 2015 Preview we’ve created a new capability to simplify the process by which developers connect their apps to cloud-based services such as Azure Storage and Azure Mobile Services, or O365 and even 3rd parties such as Salesforce.

· Sign-in and view resources for multiple Azure accounts – Visual Studio 2015 Preview enables you to be signed in simultaneously with multiple Azure accounts. View and manage Azure resources associated with those accounts in Server Explorer.

· Environments hub in Team Explorer – Visual Studio 2015 Preview includes a new Environments hub in Team Explorer. This enables teams to manage Azure environments and share these environments with other team members. Developers can deploy applications to Azure environments from a Cloud Deployment Project, and view resources, logs, and activities related to their environments. For more information on what’s new for cloud developers please see the Azure SDK 2.5 release notes.

· IDE productivity

o Debugging & Diagnostics – Visual Studio 2015 enhances the Breakpoint capabilities with a new setting windows that allows developers to specify conditions and actions for breakpoints, including improved IntelliSense support for breakpoint conditions and actions. Developers also get PerfTips, a new feature to see how long code took to execute right from the code editor. Finally, there is also new support for using Lambda Expression in the debugger windows such as Watch and Immediate.

o Code Editor – Visual Studio 2015 built on top of .NET Compiler Platform (“Roslyn”) brings many new features and improvements to existing capabilities to the code editor. This includes new light bulbs for quick action access to common commands such as refactoring code, including a new enhanced preview of how the code will be effected. We’ve also added refactoring support for Visual Studio, as part of Light Bulbs enhancement.

o Code Analysis & Testing – Visual Studio 2015 now supports a new enhanced live code analysis capabilities, along with code analysis extensibility to 3rd party library developers through NuGet packages. With this enhancements developer get live code, advising them of issues as they type code without having to rebuild the project. In addition when NuGet libraries are extended to provide specific code-aware guidance, the editor will also light-up those changes as if they were built-in, helping solve problems early in the development lifecycle. We’ve also added a new feature called Smart Unit Testing (formerly PEX from Microsoft Research), which will explore your .NET code to generate test data and a suite of unit tests automatically.

o Visual Studio IDE – The Visual Studio 2015 IDE has been enhanced to better support high-resolution displays with new icons in locations such as command bar, tool window toolbars and many other locations. We’ve also added touch support to the code editor, which can handle touch commands and gestures such as scrolling, tapping, pinch-to-zoom, etc.

To see the full details on what’s new in Visual Studio 2015 Preview please visit our release notes.

 

Q: What is new for C++ in Visual Studio 2015 Preview?  

A: Visual Studio 2015 Preview contains many improvements for C++ developers, including a new capabilities to take C++ code cross-platform. Below you’ll find some highlights of C++ features across core categories:

· Cross-platform Mobile Development with C++

o Developers can now use Visual Studio 2015 to share, reuse, build, deploy, and debug code for use in C++ cross-platform mobile projects. Developers can create projects from templates for Android Native Activity apps, or for shared code libraries that you can use on multiple platforms and in Xamarin native apps.

· Visual Studio IDE Productivity for C++ Projects

o In Visual Studio 2015 we’ve made dozens of improvements around developer productivity, debugging and diagnostics. Some highlights include a new “move function definition”, “convert to raw string literal” and other new refactoring capabilities. We’ve also made improvements to the Profile Guided Optimization capability, improved “Find in Files” feature and added a new Native Memory Diagnostics capability to help developers understand their application use of memory right from Visual Studio.

· C++ Language

o In Visual Studio 2015 the C++ compiler and standard library have been updated with enhanced support for C++11 and initial support for certain C++14 features. They also include preliminary support for certain features expected to be in the C++17 standard.

· C++ Build

o In Visual Studio 2015 we’ve focused on improving build times in the typical edit/build/debug scenarios, which is where developer spend most of their time. As these builds are typically incremental, the linker is where most of the productivity time is lost. To help improve this, we’ve made changes to the static libraries that are referenced by other code modules so that they are now linked incrementally, which greatly improves build performance.

We’ve also made over 400 compiler bug fixes, including 179 submitted through our Microsoft connect website as customer feedback.

 

Q: What SKUs are included in the Visual Studio 2015 Preview release?

A: We are releasing Visual Studio Ultimate 2015 Preview.

 

Q: Will Visual Studio 2015 Preview support Windows 10 as support is not included in the release?

A: No. Visual Studio Preview does not include yet the tools for developing Windows 10 applications. The existing Windows 10 release does not target developers and therefore the tools and SDK are not yet available.

 

Q: Why is Microsoft putting so much emphasis on cross-platform development tools? Does this mean the company is moving away from Windows?  

A: Not at all. Today’s universe of mobile-first, cloud-first is diverse. We have a committed effort to engage all developers, from the enterprise to the startup, on every app they want to target. That means embracing any device including Windows, iOS and Android and any operating system for the cloud including Windows Server and Linux.

 

Q: Where can I download the preview?  

A: Developers may download and try out the preview for the next versions of Visual Studio 2015 here https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=517106.

 

Q: Microsoft will now have built-in support for Android and iOS development within Visual Studio, why?  

A: Today’s universe of mobile-first, cloud-first is diverse. We have a committed effort to engage all developers, from the enterprise to the startup, on every app they want to target. That means embracing any device including Windows, iOS and Android and any operating system for the cloud including Windows Server and Linux.

 

Q: What are shared projects?  

A: In Visual Studio, we've introduced a notion of shared projects for C#, C++ and JavaScript, making sharing code and assets between the Windows and Windows Phone heads of the same app as easy as possible. 

 

Q: Shared projects were originally for universal Windows apps, do they now extend across Android and iOS?  

A: Yes. Shared projects are the foundation for cross-platform mobile development in Visual Studio.

Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 and other releases

 

Q: What is new in VS 2013 Update 4?  

A: Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 brings with it many new features and bug fixes for Visual Studio 2013, Team Foundation Server 2013 and Release Management 2013.

Highlights of new or updated features include:

· A new GPU Usage tool in the Performance and Diagnostics hub helps you determine whether the CPU or the GPU is the performance bottleneck

· Improvements to JSON and HTML editors, as well as enhanced tool for Azure WebJobs.

· Support for SQL Server 2014 from SQL Server Data Tool projects and other enhancements

· Various enhancements and new features to Team Foundation Server, with highlights such as Git Pull Requests and other improvements to work planning, test case management, release management and other capabilities

For full details on what’s new in Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 please see our release notes.

 

Q: What is new in the latest CTP released today of Cordova Tooling for Visual Studio 2013 RTM?

A: The new release of Visual Studio Tooling for Apache Cordova is included in-the-box with Visual Studio 2015 Preview, or as an OOB release for Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 (Update 4 is required).

New features in this release includes:

  • Update on save for Ripple – No need to rebuild!
  • The ability to debug an iOS version of your app right from Visual Studio when deployed to the iOS Simulator or a connected device on a Mac
  • Improved security and simplified configuration for the included remote iOS build agent
  • An improved plugin management experience that includes support for adding in custom plugin to your project from git or the filesystem
  • The ability to select platform specific configuration options from an improved config.xml designer
  • Support for Apache Cordova 4.0.0

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Am I right that the "community edition" of vs 2013 does not include CPU Usage and all those others in the N/A Tools part of the Performance and Diagnostics, Analysis Target page? GPU Usage is there along with Performance Wizard.  The GPU (graphics) is not working ("Diagnostics session failed to start.  Failed to enable system trace session."). The CPU sampling looks to be working.

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Visual Studio Community 2013 shares the same features as Visual Studio Professional 2013 today and licensing terms determine who can use this product. Based on the target audience for this product, SharePoint, Office, LightSwitch and Cloud Business Applications are not included in the installation.  

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Ms. Chen, will the Federal Government be able to use the Community Edition of VS 2013?  I work for an office in the US Army with a small group of web developers, our code is not released under an open source licensing agreement, but our code is publicly available upon request.

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    To Not Applicable Tools: Also, you can use IE F12 tool to measure the performance when you use IE10 and above.  F12 provides the similar performance and diagnostics tool as in Visual Studio.

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    To John, I am not an expert on the license, please refer to the EULA within the product for specific terms, and to the Visual Studio Licensing whitepaper for more guidance) at www.microsoft.com/.../details.aspx If you work for Federal Government, you team may already have a MSDN subscription so you should be covered by the paid Visual Studio version like professional, or ultimate.  Check with your team.

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Will there be a corresponding release of Visual Studio 2015 community edition at some point incorporating new usability features found in that release or will it be necessary to purchase a 2015 equivalent of the current 2013 professional edition.

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Hello, Doris >> Based on the target audience for this product, SharePoint, Office, LightSwitch and Cloud Business Applications are not included in the installation It's only installer limitation (not license)? Can I install " Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2013" and use LightSwitch/Office project in Visual Studio Community?

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Hi, Could you please clarify the following :

  • will there still be a Visual Studio 2015 professional WITHOUT MSDN ?
  • if there's a vs2015 without MSDN what would be the benefit compared to the community edition ?
  • what is the difference between vs2013 professional (without MSDN) vs vs2013 professional online ?

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    So what about those who purchased Visual Studio 2013 without the MSDN? Is that basically just gone? What features does plain Professional have over the community edition at this point?

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    Craig, While the two editions share the same features today, the licensing terms determine who can use this product. We continue to invest in our paid offerings including MSDN subscription benefits and services, which many Visual Studio Professional users can take advantage of today. Also, you need to be eligible to use the community edition, check the blog for more detail.

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    Keith, Yes, the community edition will become our first and best free offering for developers creating non-enterprise apps. The Community Edition will go forward into VS2015.

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    XTbe, Geelcubed, If you qualify for the Community Edition based on the licensing terms then you probably can just use Community edition. We are at the VS 2015 preview now, more information will be available later.

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    Doris, I read Light Switch Team blog post blogs.msdn.com/.../develop-lightswitch-and-cloud-business-apps-using-visual-studio-community-2013.asp, where have recomendatin: "You can get started developing with the community edition with these two steps.   •Install Visual Studio Community 2013 •Install Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2013 – November Update using the Web Platform Installer"

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    Doris, Thank you!

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    Thank you Mihail to share more detail!

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    According to Visual Studio Blog Community Edition will not be localized, at least the 2013 version. Can you confirm?

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    Do you plan to release Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition?

  • Anonymous
    November 14, 2014
    If I am a freelancer, how do I determine which of my clients are enterprises and which aren't?  I assume that most businesses out there that higher freelancers do make $1M in revenues per year (revenues are income prior to expenses and taxes).  Do I need to audit my clients?  If I have even one client that is "enterprise", then I assume I have to pay the license fee. Please note that I read the whitepaper here:   www.microsoft.com/.../confirmation.aspx

  • Anonymous
    November 15, 2014
    Rick, I am not an expert on license.  Here's what I know.  Any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community, to create their own free or paid apps. The idea of having community edition is for a student, open source contributor, or small team to create compelling applications – powerful productivity features, cross-platform mobile tools for Windows, iOS, and Android, as well as access to extensions.  If you are hired by your client, an enterprise organization (meaning those with >250 PCs or > $1M in annual revenue) no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research and classroom learning environment scenarios described above. This means that enterprise client will need to worry about the license agreement. Hope this clarifies a bit.

  • Anonymous
    November 15, 2014
    Eyal, Yes there should be a VS 2015 community edition.  Stay tuned.

  • Anonymous
    November 15, 2014
    Bit confused. I'm a java/android dev. If I switch to viz studio community ed. does this mean I can write ios and android apps in c# or visual basic ? Are these native apps. Or is it like cordova/phonegap. DO i have to buy/install plugins   ?

  • Anonymous
    November 15, 2014
    Thanks. ;)

  • Anonymous
    November 17, 2014
    Is it possible to build android app using c#?

  • Anonymous
    November 17, 2014
    "Any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community, to create their own free or paid apps." this is a little confusing is that mean that if I'm working on someone else's apps, I'm not considered an Individual, in this case can a group of people (students, members of an open source projects...) be considered an organization? Would you please explain what's an "Organization" or point me somewhere where I can find the definition?

  • Anonymous
    November 21, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 03, 2014
    I recently installed Visual Studio Community 2013 to develop android applications. But i am unable to find how to develop android app.I am familiar with c# language.please help me how to use vs2013 to develop android application

  • Anonymous
    December 08, 2014
    Can I use Visual Studio Community to build a game with my friends and sell it on steam?

  • Anonymous
    December 15, 2014
    Hi, I wanna use VS for personal projects (windows form) and I wanna know if there is any limitation on vs 2013 community or vs 2015 preview. tks

  • Anonymous
    January 04, 2015
    can I use same coding in visual basic.net 2010 and 2014?

  • Anonymous
    January 07, 2015
    Any plans for C# extension properties?

  • Anonymous
    January 25, 2015
    Hi, can I install VS2013 CE after I've installed VS2015 preview?  The license for my copy of VS2013 Pro has expired (it was a company one and I left that company) but I have apps I want to keep developing in VS2013 as I don't think I will be able to afford VS2015 when it comes out and I don't want to end up with orphaned solution files. Anyway, I know I probably won't get a quick reply here so I'll give it a try - just had very experiences in the past (re)installing older versions of VS when there are newer versions already present.

  • Anonymous
    January 25, 2015
    Mike, There should be a VS 2015 community edition, so you can start using VS2015 preview, and continue with CS 2015 community edition when it's available.  You should be able to install VS 2013 community edition with VS 2015 Preview in theory, however I haven't tried myself.  Give a try and let us know If it's working.

  • Anonymous
    February 04, 2015
    Hi I work in an organization. But I want to download Visual Studio Community 2013 for learning on my office machine. Community Edition will not be used for developing any application for organization or its client. It would only be used by myself for some learning purpose. Am I allowed to do this without paying a fee?

  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2015
    hello , i am working with project of cross platform application through cordova and i have visual studio 2010 ultimate. Is it compatible with all requirements need for cross platform applications.? or is it necessary to use visual studio 2013 for cross plateform. ?  

  • Anonymous
    March 14, 2015
    I know the license question has been answered a few times, but I have a question regarding the flowing scenario using VS2013 Community or Express... I work for a company that does not sell software. If we wanted to make applications for our own private use, and not for resale, and we only had at most 3 people ever involved in the process, can the community or expresses editions be used, or would I need to get pro? The apps would not be used on anymore than 20 devices by my estimation, but I am unsure of annual revenue.

  • Anonymous
    March 14, 2015
    Is this free for a company that is not going to sell the software. Maybe one developer building CRUD app that will be used internally only. Maybe 20 end users.

  • Anonymous
    April 11, 2015
    Can I develop cross platform native apps for android ios with visual studio community 2013?

  • Anonymous
    May 29, 2015
    can any one tell me about estimation time of installing visual studio 2013 in i5 machine..??

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2015
    Is Visual studio 2013 supported in windows 10 as i am going to update to windows 10 ?

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2015
    @Nilesh For windows 10, you can use Visual Studio 2015 community edition (free) to get a lot of new feature.

  • Anonymous
    June 02, 2015
    @Chirag Yes, for community 2013, you can use Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova CTP3.1 download from www.microsoft.com/.../details.aspx. This feature is already included in VS 2015 so you don't have to add anything if you use VS 2015 community.

  • Anonymous
    June 17, 2015
    I have a visual studio community 2013 and visual studio professional 2013 installed on my pc. I got the professional version through my dreamspark subscription. I want to uninstall one of them to free up some disk space. Which one of them should I uninstall and will that effect the other program in any way? or should I leave both of them uninstalled. I am currently working only with the visual studio professional version.

  • Anonymous
    July 21, 2015
    Can I have both the Visual Studio 2013 Community and the Visual Studio 2015 Community side by side on the same machine? I mean legally?

  • Anonymous
    July 21, 2015
    Hi, Does VS2015 Community edition require an MSDN subscription to get a license?  I think this was the case with VS2013 Community edition

  • Anonymous
    August 20, 2015
    Does VS2015 Community edition require an MSDN subscription to get a license?  I think this was the case with VS2013 Community edition