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Opening up Visual Studio and .NET to Every Developer, Any Application: .NET Server Core open source and cross platform, Visual Studio Community 2013 and preview of Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 2015

Visual Studio and .NET have been two bedrocks of the Microsoft developer ecosystem for over a decade.  With over 1.8 billion installations of .NET and over 7 million downloads of Visual Studio 2013 in just the last year, Visual Studio and .NET are enabling millions of developers to build some of today’s most important software and services powering businesses, apps and sites.

Today, we are taking the next big step for the Microsoft developer platform, opening up access to .NET and Visual Studio to an even broader set of developers by beginning the process of open-sourcing the full .NET server core stack and introducing a new free and fully-featured edition of Visual Studio.  At the same time, we are releasing previews of the next generation of Visual Studio, .NET and Visual Studio Online.

To summarize some of the key news we are announcing today:

  • Over the coming months, we will be open sourcing the full server-side .NET Core stack, from ASP.NET 5 down to the Core Runtime and Framework, and the open source .NET will be expanded to run on Linux and Mac OS X in addition to Windows.
     
  • Visual Studio Community 2013 is a new, free and fully featured edition of Visual Studio, available today, with access to the full Visual Studio extensibility ecosystem and support for targeting any platform, from devices and desktop to web and cloud services.
     
  • A preview of the next generation of our tools is available today with Visual Studio 2015 Preview and .NET 2015 Preview.  Together, these bring industry-leading cross-platform mobile development tools, deep support for cloud development, and great productivity improvements across the breadth of the developer experience. 
     
  • Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 is available now for every Visual Studio 2013 user, including dozens of improvements across the product plus several great new features.
     
  • Visual Studio Online is expanding its DevOps portfolio with the new Visual Studio Online Release Management service and Visual Studio Cloud Deployment Projects.

For in-depth coverage of these announcements and more, tune in to the Connect(); event coverage on Channel 9 either live or on-demand.

With these releases, we are broadly opening up access to our industry leading platform and tools to every developer building any application in today’s mobile-first, cloud-first world.  No matter if you are a startup, a student, a hobbyist, an open source developer or a commercial developer, and no matter the platform you are targeting or the app you are creating, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Online, .NET and Azure will help you be successful.

.NET Open Source and Cross-Platform

Today, we are beginning the work to make the entire .NET Core server stack open source.  Several key components, like ASP.NET and the C# compiler have been open sourced previously, and today, we are releasing several additional components or the Core .NET framework.  Over the next several months, we will be open sourcing the remainder of the .NET Core Runtime and .NET Core Framework.  These projects will be released under the MIT open source license and we are also issuing an explicit patent promise to clarify users patent rights to .NET. 

Developers can begin engaging with the breadth of .NET open source projects today at https://github.com/Microsoft/dotnet

As part of the open source .NET project, we will also be expanding .NET to target Linux and Mac OS X in addition to Windows.  This will provide great new opportunities and flexibility for .NET developers, and enable .NET to be used in many new application scenarios.  We are excited to be working closely with the Mono community on this effort, to jointly deliver an open-source, enterprise-ready .NET implementation for the server to Windows, Linux and OS X.  Miguel de Icaza of the Mono project shares our excitement: “This is a new and exciting time for .NET developers. We are going to blend the best technologies from .NET into Mono, and the cross platform capabilities of Mono into .NET, giving C# developers the best of both worlds."

Visual Studio Community 2013

Great apps require great tools, and today we are opening up access to Visual Studio to an even broader set of developers. 

Visual Studio Community 2013 is a new free, fully-featured edition of Visual Studio that lets developers target any platform, from desktop and mobile to web and cloud.  Visual Studio Community 2013 also supports full Visual Studio extensibility, offering access to the ecosystem of over 5000 extensions.

In addition to broad platform support in a unified Visual Studio experience, Visual Studio Community 2013 also includes dozens of great Visual Studio tools, including Peek, Blend, Code Analysis, Graphical Debugging and full C# refactoring.

Support for Visual Studio extensibility means developers gain access to tools for a wide variety of technologies and platforms supported by the rich Visual Studio extensibility ecosystem, including the Visual Studio Gallery.   For example, Visual Studio Community users have access to the excellent Visual Studio Tools for Unity and the open source Node.js Tools for Visual Studio and Web Essentials for Visual Studio.

Opening up access to Visual Studio extensibility to a wider audience also creates great new opportunities for extension authors to build new tools and experiences on top of the Visual Studio platform.  For both open source and commercial extension authors, Visual Studio offers a great developer tools platform.

And most importantly, Visual Studio Community 2013 is free for any non-enterprise application development.

Developers can now use the breadth Microsoft’s tools and services for free with Visual Studio Community 2013 tools for developing applications from mobile and desktop to web and cloud, Azure Free Trial providing hosting for 10 websites + 10 mobile services, and Visual Studio Online offering developer services free for up to 5 users.  You can get started with all three offers today.

 

Visual Studio 2015 Preview and .NET 2015 Preview

The next generation of Visual Studio and .NET brings substantial improvements in core developer productivity, as well as new support for cross-platform mobile development and cloud-based development.  You can download Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 2015 previews now.

Productivity

The C# and VB code editing experiences get even better in Visual Studio 2015 with built-in integration of the new “Roslyn” .NET compiler platform.  New language features in C# 6 reduce boilerplate and clutter in everyday code, and the new light bulbs in the editor bring proactive refactoring and code fix opportunities to your attention as you are writing or browsing code. 

Visual Studio 2015 continues to improve on core debugging and profiling experiences, with support for breakpoint configuration and PerfTips, both available directly in context in the editor as well as support for debugging lambda expressions.

We’ve also added the Smart Unit Tests feature to Visual Studio 2015.  Based on the Pex technology developed by Microsoft Research, Smart Unit Tests analyses code and automatically generates unit tests to describe its behavior.

Desktop development continues to be important for many Visual Studio and .NET developers.  As part of .NET 2015 we will deliver .NET 4.6, the next update to the desktop .NET framework.  This release will include a few key improvements to the WPF platform, including support for transparent windows and multi-image cursor files.  In addition, Visual Studio 2015 Preview adds new tools for WPF development, including a Visual Diagnostics tool, a Timeline tool, and a re-designed Blend designer experience.  We’ve published a new roadmap for WPF with additional details.

Cloud

Visual Studio 2015 is the most deeply cloud-aware IDE we’ve ever built, from Azure and Visual Studio Online integration, to cloud application development.

.NET 2015 includes ASP.NET 5, a new, lean and composable framework for building web and cloud applications.  ASP.NET 5 is cross-platform and open source, and apps can run side-by-side with different versions of the framework on the same server. 

ASP.NET 5 also brings a new developer experience built upon on-demand compilation, enabling a faster edit-debug cycle, and support for any code editor.  Visual Studio 2015 includes all the familiar ASP.NET MVC tooling experiences for ASP.NET 5. 

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Visual Studio 2015 also includes the Add Connected Service dialog, making it easy to discover and consume REST APIs in your applications, including services from both Microsoft and 3rdparties, with support for Azure Mobile Services, Azure Storage, Office 365 and Salesforce today.  In addition, you can also add AD authentication to your web apps using the Azure Active Directory Authentication wizard.

Developers integrating with the rich data and services in Office 365 can build upon the new Office 365 APIs which are generally available now and can get started using the API sandbox or today’s release of new Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio

Also available today is the Azure SDK 2.5, with further improvements to cloud diagnostics and remote debugging support for Azure VM and Cloud Services.

Cross-Platform Mobile Development

As developers continue to increase their focus on targeting the mobile device platform spanning iOS, Android and Windows, the need for cross-platform mobile development solutions has never been greater.

On top of great tools for building Universal Windows Applications, Visual Studio 2015 offers the most complete cross-platform mobile application development environment, with great solutions for C#, C++ and HTML/JavaScript development targeting iOS, Android, Windows and more. 

C# and Xamarin

The Xamarin Platform enables developers to build native applications within Visual Studio for every device using the productivity of .NET while leveraging all the power of the device. We continue to partner with Xamarin to enable a great experience for C# and F# developers doing cross-platform mobile development.

Today we are expanding this collaboration in three key ways:

  • We are jointly providing a discount to eligible MSDN subscribers for Xamarin Business or Enterprise.
  • We are increasing the integration between Visual Studio and Xamarin, with a streamlined experience for installing Xamarin from Visual Studio.
  • Xamarin will add Visual Studio support to its free offering Xamarin Starter Edition later this year.  This complements the release of Visual Studio Community, opening up .NET cross-platform mobile development to any developer.

C++

C++ continues to be a leading choice for high-performance applications and the richest possible experiences across the industry.  For mobile developers, C++ is a key part of game development and high performance shared code libraries across multiple platforms, an increasingly important component of today’s richest mobile applications.

With Visual Studio 2015, we are delivering a complete tool chain for cross-platform mobile development with C++.  This includes integrated support for the Clang complier and LLVM optimizer for targeting Android now and iOS soon.  You can edit and debug a single set of C++ source code, and build it for iOS, Android and Windows.

Visual Studio 2015 also brings dozens of additional productivity features for C++ developers, including new refactorings, improved “Find in Files” and improved incremental builds.  At the same time, the Visual C++ compiler includes more complete C++ 11 and C++ 14 support.

HTML/JavaScript and Apache Cordova

On mobile devices HTML5 and JavaScript are expanding from rich mobile-optimized web experiences to increasingly being used as part of packaged mobile applications.  Visual Studio 2015 includes built-in support building applications for the open source Apache Cordova platform targeting iOS, Android and Windows. 

The Visual Studio support for Cordova provides tools for authoring, debugging, analyzing, packaging, and deploying Cordova applications, all within the familiar Visual Studio IDE. 

The newest release of the Visual Studio Tools for Cordova includes support for Windows 8.1/Universal apps, iOS debugging from within Visual Studio, and seamless integration with TypeScript, providing a highly productive application authoring experience. 

Visual Studio Emulator for Android

As developers target multiple mobile device form factors, great emulators are key to productive development cycles.  As part of Visual Studio 2015, developers now also get access to the Visual Studio Emulator for Android, a high-performance x86-based emulator for the Android platform that supports a variety of productivity features for emulating device inputs like accelerometer, location, and network conditions.

Visual Studio 2013 Update 4

In parallel with development of Visual Studio 2015, we’ve also been delivering regular updates to Visual Studio 2013.  Today, Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 is available for all Visual Studio 2013 users, including dozens of improvements as well as several new features, including full integration of the Unity Tools for Visual Studio, enabling developers to use the Visual Studio IDE for Unity application development.

DevOps in Visual Studio and Visual Studio Online

The integration of Dev and Ops continues to enable new agility in the end-to-end application development process.  Visual Studio Online, TFS, Azure and Visual Studio are bringing a collection of integrated tools to help organizations embrace DevOps practices.

Cloud Deployment Projects enable environment configuration to be captured as code and managed along with cloud projects and solutions in Visual Studio.  Cloud Deployment Projects is part of the Azure SDK 2.5 tools for Visual Studio which is available today.

Release Management for Visual Studio is now available as a Visual Studio Online service preview.  Release Management helps organizations to easily orchestrate deployments of source and configuration artifacts across their dev/test/production pipelines.  This enables teams to release more frequently, with higher confidence.

Summary

Today, we had the opportunity to share our vision for the Microsoft developer platform.  As part of that vision, we aspire to enable every developer and any application to have access to Visual Studio, .NET, Azure and Visual Studio Online. 

No matter whether you are a startup, a student, a hobbyist, an open source developer or a commercial developer, and no matter the platform you are targeting or the app you are creating, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Online, .NET and Azure will enable you to build for the breadth of today’s mobile, desktop, web and cloud platforms.

Namaste!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 11, 2014
    Please open-source the XNA as well! visualstudio.uservoice.com/.../3725445-xna-5

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Dude.

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Finally a fully featured edition of Visual Studio. No more "Express" restrictions.

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Interesting to know that there is new version of Visual Studio to be released. Has a release date been set?

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Is it, or will it ever be, possible to use Clang and LLVM for desktop development?

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    The announcement states that you will "deliver an open-source, enterprise-ready .NET implementation for the server ". Will the .NET implementation also run on the desktop versions of the operating systems such as desktop Linux?

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    @Juan Davila Not yet.

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    @Ivan171 Right now, just for Android. John

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Xamarin Starter Edition... Last time I tried that I included a form with a button, a di library and hit the size limit.  So does doubling the size limit mean I can add two buttons to the form before hitting the size limit?  At least indie developers who want to use visual studio to build xplat apps can now stop giving the money we used to have to pay for VS pro to Microsoft and instead give it to Xamarin to cover part of the $2000 dollars a year you need to pay to build c# apps on ios/droid.   Keerching Xamarin!

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    This is great! Congratulations to all those involved.

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    A bit confused about "non-enterprise application development".  I'm an independent developer that writes rich (fat?) client applications for small (5-200 employee) businesses using Windows servers and desktops with SQL Server as the database.  Is that "enterprise application development"?

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Thank you, it is a great news for students!

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Excellent! Keep it up!

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    That is not happening. Isn't it?

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    So whats understood under non-enterprise application development ? When is a company an enterprise ? Is this Microsoft speak for non-comercial or is there a size limit ?

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    J'aime cette companie!, I love this companie!

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    @Rolf Huisman In the Q & A I thought he mentioned teams of up to 5 people, but would be nice to get confirmation.

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Great News!!

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    @Martin Was this with Xamarin.Forms?  Xamarin.Forms is excluded from Starter compatibility as a feature for paying customers, but apart from that, all the apps on xamarin.com/starter were built within the limits of Starter, and we're dedicated to making sure Xamarin Starter enables developers to ship useful native apps.

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Awesome!

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Is WCF covered with "the full server-side .NET Core stack" ?

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    If your serious about Linux, bring back the emacs keybindings for Visual Studio.

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    What does "free for any non-enterprise application development" mean? There are other mentions that this can be used to create enterprise applications.

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Wow, so much awesomenes in one blog post! This has got to be a record!

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    @Christiaan Rakowski - thank you.  Indeed it was awesome to be able to represent the team's work today. -somasegar

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    这是一个极好的消息!

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    OMG!!!

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Does windows phone development still need a virtualization enabled processor  plus windows pro machine?  Any chance of windows home edition supporting this?

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    What about WCF? Is it included in the server-side packages?

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Wow, sounds and looks really amazing i love the new mobile emulator.  I wanted to know if that apps written for IOS/android are native and if there is still a need to use Xamarin. Thank guys, this promises to be the BEST thing ever for us developers :-)

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    This is a good news for me. Nice one, Microsoft :) Keep up the community spirit.

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Great News. Waiting for further updates.

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    I was disappointed to know that Microsoft did not buy out xamarin,  not sure why, maybe it's not a competitor? So I wanted to stop reading the announcement but then  c++ from not far below drag me back. Making tools for cross platforms for c++, now all of a sudden,  c++ is looking so pretty, Maybe pulling a few bunch hair for c++ are worthy now. Why? Microsoft, why dont you buy xamarin?!!

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    What is this, Yesterday I goes to home at 9 0 Clock PM. And after few min you release it. I really like it. I thing to write a post for debugging and missing feature in express edition and you come with community edition. Thanks for this, Please thing to fix bugs in VS 13. I still my VS crashed when I pres ctrl+ , to find a file. This kind of thing make me feel that Visual studio is still not stable like other thing like eclipse, Sublime text,webstorm.

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Any chance to see Visual Studio coming to Linux !?

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    非常好,希望.net平台展现自己的实力

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    What version of .Net will start the cross platform Linux and Mac support?

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Very good news, wery well!

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Very, very great news! I am a Sysadmin which codes .NET since 2005. I call my self a DevOp using heavily Windows PowerShell and .NET. As Sysadmin I ever dreamed of cross Platform support. Hope that Windows PowerShell will also go Open-Sourced soon, Jeffrey Snover has told so! We DevOps need PowerShell even on Linux / iOS. There is an Opensource Project to port PowerShell to Linux / iOS with Mono called Pash. github.com/Pash-Project Please Support this port in any way! WPF is no cross Platform player and is and was the wrong way, because it rely on DirectX, it is not portable to Linux, so stick with Windows Forms which are ported over to Linux. Please keep up the Windows Forms support or port WPF to Linux ;-) . Or is HTML 5 the GUI winner. In the mentioned WPF article there is not a single word about cross platform! So here are my 2 Questions: How is the GUI Roadmap in the cross platform strategy? I know there is a opensource project to develop PowerShell stuff with Visual Studio, but what about offical Windows PowerShell support from the Visual Studio team?

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    I second the comments to please make XNA open source too.

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    This is a genuinely exciting announcement and gives me hope C#/.NET has a future - well done!

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    This is the most awesomest news coming from Microsoft!!!

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Great work guys.  Keep on moving.  

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Iam Student and Iam developing a Enterprise  application for my fathers business and Iam not going to market that application so in this case what I need to do.

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    All great news, but what about Visual Basic.Net? Call me 'old', 'stupid' or whatever, but I still use it to develop very fast.

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    When will be available localized ISOs of Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition?

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Now a product that can do that all now: Embarcadero RadStudio XE7 ;-)

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    @WCF Guy The WCF client is part of .NET Core 5, which we announced we are opening sourcing. The WCF server piece is not part of .NET Core 5, so is not part of what we've committed to making available on github. Might be a good idea to create a User Voice entry on that, so we can gauge how strong the desire is for that.

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    @COBRASoft - Great stuff for VB.NET devs yesterday as well - VS2015 productivity features, more .NET open source and lots more.

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Does the Visual Studio Community Edition contain the same features as the Visual Studio Ultmate What are the differences between the versions - what is missing - I have tried to look for a comparison grid but could not find one.

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Can I then get a refund of my visual studio proff? :)

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    One word, WOW. This is some of the most exciting news out of Microsoft ever!

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Mr. Somsegar, Is MSFT committed long term on supporting .Net on Linux and OS X? we still remember the wasted efforts on  J++ and J# and had been painful experience for us. Do we even try it out without any such public commitment? Thanks. .Net for IOS and Android could be a good thing too.

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    This is GREAT!

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    @wwaldner You don't really get "Linux key bindings." There are extensions that will give you key bindings for common Linux editors. I know people who use the emacs key bindings (visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/09dc58c4-6f47-413a-9176-742be7463f92) and there are a couple of extensions that will do vim (e.g. visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/59ca71b3-a4a3-46ca-8fe1-0e90e3f79329). John

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    Will it be Visual Studio for Linux/Mac?

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    @Kode The Windows Phone emulator requires Hyper-V still, yes. John

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    @VinodJacob   Thanks for noting that. We'll take a look at updating the page at www.visualstudio.com/.../compare-visual-studio-products-vs John

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    @glat I think I answered your question on the Visual Studio blog, too, but: VS Community 2013 is en-us only. ISOs of en-us are available for download www.visualstudio.com/.../download-visual-studio-vs. For Visual Studio 2015, we'll be looking at adding other languages. John

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    @Anirudha That one doesn't repro for me, but we'll keep an eye out for this. You can help by submitting a bug through Send-a-Smile in the IDE or on Connect. Thanks! John

  • Anonymous
    November 12, 2014
    @Sudheer Agreed and we'll look at how we make VS Community smaller. John

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    Thanks Microsoft. You Are Really A Leading Company.

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    Thank You Microsoft. We Always with you...

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    Duh... Big deal. I been developing full pirated version of C# .Net for almost a decade.

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    Good move!!! Lot of things to do..

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    So, has the whole of Microsoft forgotten about Code plex. Why are they using GitHub?

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    This is great news! Maybe Microsoft does want to play with us after all.....

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    Thanks for microsoft for this awsome decision! One question is it possible to running Visual Studio community editoin in other platforms like Linux or Mac? Regards.

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    Awesome. I can't wait to download and play!

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    Yawn

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    Great news of .NET & VS open source, as per the industry trend.

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    Awesome

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    Wow! Thanks for the great work! I think it's time I get back to Visual Studio after 6+ years of Mac/iOS development. Does VS Community support MFC like VS Pro did?

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    Awesome!! What will Java do now? :p

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    Great news!

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    Microsoft is Back! love it love love it!

  • Anonymous
    November 13, 2014
    @NickMtl Yes, VS Community supports MFC. John

  • Anonymous
    November 14, 2014
    yup, got it

  • Anonymous
    November 14, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 14, 2014
    Good move

  • Anonymous
    November 14, 2014
    Will you be sharing the sample code for the MyShuttle app? Looked like a great project to take a look at!

  • Anonymous
    November 14, 2014
    That was the great move by Microsoft for .NET Dev Community.

  • Anonymous
    November 14, 2014
    @Tom - The demo was not meant to be a reference app but seeing this request from you and others, we are going to package the most relevant parts and publish it. It will take us some time to get there and we'll provide an update as soon as it's done.

  • Anonymous
    November 14, 2014
    Will there be a Visual Basic Blank App (Universal Apps) template in VS 2015?

  • Anonymous
    November 15, 2014
    Xamarin is too expensive. For independent developper, student, teacher, or small companies, it's impossible to use this product with this price...

  • Anonymous
    November 16, 2014
    Good move by Microsoft. Hope a website built on this stack can be viwed on desktop browser as well as handheld devices with same look and feel without have to worry about CSS and fluid layout designs

  • Anonymous
    November 16, 2014
    Dear Soma, Thanks to you and the team. This is big and trust you guys will continue to support the initiatives!

  • Anonymous
    November 17, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 17, 2014
    7GB for an update is just too big.

  • Anonymous
    November 18, 2014
    If there was a way to download only VisualStudio help content, or give HelpViewer capability to "repair" damaged help content woud be very useful. I lost VS Studio help in a computer crash and I fond nothing to get It.

  • Anonymous
    November 19, 2014
    Very nice, thank you Microsoft.

  • Anonymous
    November 19, 2014
    Dear Soma and Team, Exciting news! We hope to enjoy and grow more in Visual Studio and .Net

  • Anonymous
    November 19, 2014
    I'm very happy that Microsoft invest a lot in .NET. I'm very excited about these news! I'm a big fun of .NET and I have nine questions, hope that I will get answer each of them ... 1.) What is the relation between .NET Core and .NET Native? 2.) Is it true that also .NET Core and also .NET Native not require any verson of the .NET Framework to run? 3.) What is the future of .NET Framework after 4.6? 4.) Will there be .NET Framework 5 in the future or .NET framework 4.x (x >=6) will be the last version and .NET Core will be the mainline? You said that "we chose an evolutionary approach for versioning .NET Core, which is why it is version 5, the next whole number after 4.6, the latest version of the .NET Framework." 5.) Which verison of the .NET (framework) will be included in Windows 10? 6.) You said that the client side of WCF will be included in .NET Core. What about the server side of WCF? I mean .NET Core will be a Server side technology if I understand correctly ... 7.) Will there be Portable library support for .NET Core? 8.) A summary description (blog spot or msdn article) would has be nice to clear the different subsets of the .NET also including the endded/offline paths like Silverlight. I mean currently there are a lot of subset:

  • .NET Framework
  • .NET Core
  • .NET Native
  • WinRT (Windows Runtime)
  • Silverlight (4/5)
  • .NET for Windows Store (8, 8.1) apps
  • .NET for Windows Phone Xaml apps
  • Windows Phone 8.1 Silverlight apps
  • Windows Phone 8 Silverlight apps
  • Windows Phone 7.5 Silverlight apps
  • WPF 9.) Why .NET Framework 4.6 again an in-place update? You have been created a great solution namely side-by-side installation of the .NET framework. Why don't you created the .NET framework 4.6 with side-by-side installation, instead of causing compatibility issues with current apps using .NET 4.0, 4.5 or  4.5.x? I think nowdays there is enough place on the disk for storing each of the framework. Also in the .NET 2.0, 3.0, 3.5 and 4.0 times you used this great solution.
  • Anonymous
    November 20, 2014
    A request for (officially or unofficially) enabling developers to generate Mac OS X desktop binaries with clang in VS. The prerequisites are:
  • an LLVM-Clang capable of compiling ObjC code and the OS X SDK & producing compiled units (for x86/x64) compatible with the Darwin linker tools
  • a Windows build of the Darwin linker tools (cctools, ld64, ldid), all of which are open source & have been succesfully ported to Linux; these are also needed to support iOS, so supporting Mac OS X should be relatively straightforward. I don't need or expect any emulation or remote debugging - although being able to debug a remote Mac (or indeed a VM) over IP is gravy.
  • Anonymous
    November 21, 2014
    This is excellent. This ecosystem is a pleasure to work in. Now it just gets better. Thank you.

  • Anonymous
    November 21, 2014
    @dev, slow down dude, with 4.6 going in place I don't have to go threw every project and target a different framework version. esp when its a not a ton of breaking changes, in fact in my case 1 issuse against massive code base, and am getting better results, and all i did wads update .Net , not to mention VS2008-VS2010, issues, verses offending your sensibilities I say they made the correct choice. I use WCF all the time, and write both side of the services, what is server side? the service host calls host.AddServiceEndpoint and the client side  proxy = ChannelFactory<myServices.myInterfaces>.CreateChannel(Binding, endpoint); then call proxy.service(); is all in System.ServiceModel so should all be core, someone please correct me if I'm wrong. I do have one complaint tho , the 4.6 download install as 4.5.3, I believe i is 4.6 because I saw some different behavior the file name was NDP453-KB2969353-Web, could some please check, is anyone seeing 4.6 or just 4.5.3?

  • Anonymous
    November 21, 2014
    Thank you very much Microsoft. I never need Java to develop for Android. Yes, C# .

  • Anonymous
    November 21, 2014
    This. Is. Awesome!!!!!!!!!

  • Anonymous
    November 24, 2014
    that is very necessary for programer. 10vm!!

  • Anonymous
    November 25, 2014
    One of the questions that jumps out at me very quickly in terms of streamlined cross platform app development is if we will see any crossover between App Studio and VS Tools for Apache Cordova. It seems like it would be a simplified workflow to build the base of the app in App Studio, and then be able to export/save it down to visual studio in a format that is already compatible (plumbing wise - WebView, etc...) with the Apache Cordova build pipeline... Though in an ideal world, App Studio would change over to using the Apache Cordova framework directly.

  • Anonymous
    November 27, 2014
    Microsoft - you are awesome!

  • Anonymous
    November 29, 2014
    Great news from Microsoft!.  Definitely this will increase the developer community and spread the .NET to everywhere. Many Thanks.

  • Anonymous
    November 30, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    November 30, 2014
    Soma, please just purchase Xamarin and include it in Visual Studio MSDN. I can't get approval from my boss from the finance guy for anything not included in MSDN Premium as "MSDN includes everything our developers need". Our iOS and Android App development efforts go out to third party developer vendors and it'd be great to show off our internal development capabilities by having C# be the primary development language. Thanks.

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2014
    Really, it's a great news for the microsoft developer.

  • Anonymous
    December 03, 2014
    If Microsoft could cook, I'd married it!

  • Anonymous
    December 04, 2014
    I am a big fan of both .NET and the mono community.  Have been using .NET on and off from 2001, but also JVM languages.   With regard to server-side on unix-based boxes, mono is decent, however has significant issues with GC and threading for large footprints.   I hope that the later merge of the mono and Microsoft CLR takes Microsoft's generational GC and not Mono's sgen pr boehm GC implementations.  Mono team has done a great job with a smaller investment, but Microsoft (and Sun/Oracle in the JVM world), have invested far more into making their GC scale.   I would also hope that mono threading can be reworked, as has issues with scheduling and starvation. Don't get me wrong, the mono environment is a phenomenal effort, but for big footprint production, needs work in the above areas.

  • Anonymous
    December 05, 2014
    @Jonathan Short - We're still very much just getting started, but are making good progress. We're talking with Miguel and do have a goal to pool our assets to make the best .NET products available for everyone. This includes the .NET GC, BCL libraries, RyuJIT. I cannot tell you the final configuration of all of that across .NET Core and Mono, since that's all still developing. There is a lot of conversation @ forums.dotnetfoundation.org. Feel free to jump on a thread or start a new one on this topic.

  • Anonymous
    December 10, 2014
    Is this real? or have I died? Please tell me this is real. I don't want to live in a world where I have to sell my body for a VS  license! Tell me this is not some joke! Is it April 1? Come on MS, don't be cruel. I need to know the truth here.

  • Anonymous
    December 12, 2014
    Wow, this is maybe the most awesome news from Microsoft, this is the new Microsoft, I am an enthusiast developer and I'm very grateful for this announcement... thank you so much Microsoft!!!

  • Anonymous
    December 14, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 30, 2014
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 30, 2014
    Truly the most exciting news out of Microsoft ever! I'm in awe...!

  • Anonymous
    January 04, 2015
    A great respect to Microsoft! And specially for the Community editions - it's a big step for all of us :) I use/used many IDE's for developing on C#, Java, C++, PHP5 .. like a Netbeans, IntelliJ IDEA, eclipse, MonoDevelop(Xamarin) etc. Now we have excellent choice between existing free IDE's without restriction like extensions etc. :) great news! so.., where to look the source code of the Community edition ? :) it will be nice if it's also available to all, i think anyway, Big Thanks :) i'm happy ^_^

  • Anonymous
    January 07, 2015
    Great stuff!!

  • Anonymous
    January 09, 2015
    Awesome.... We are gonna get the best IDE for development.

  • Anonymous
    March 22, 2015
    Good Post

  • Anonymous
    March 28, 2015
    microsoft should buy out Xamarin and let it be free, otherwise not much individual java and xcode developer will choose it

  • Anonymous
    April 15, 2015
    Can i develop with visual studio community on Linux or OSx?

  • Anonymous
    April 16, 2015
    @Dan from israel - Visual Studio Community runs just on Windows developer machines.