Coinciding with the announcement that Microsoft is open sourcing .NET, the firm has released a new edition of Visual Studio Professional 2013. Dubbed Visual Studio Community 2013 (VSC2013), this release is available now and free to use for the many popular usage scenarios.
In this case free means that VSC2013 is available for use without additional cost to individual users, non-profit users, and non-enterprise organizations. Microsoft was able to produce VSC2013 so quickly because it fundamentally is a rebranded copy of VS2013 Professional. This means users will find a tool more capable than the previously released Visual Studio Express editions. Developers can use Microsoft’s flagship offering to target the obvious Windows platforms as well as Android, iOS, and Unity.
As noted by the Microsoft OneCode Team, VSC2013 supports the plugins in the Visual Studio Gallery, making this edition more useful than Visual Studio Express which cannot use extensions. For those in corporate settings, Visual Studio Professional remains available.
VSC2013 is available via the usual web installer and full DVD ISO options. It comes with Update 4 applied.
(Correction: Fixed typo. Thanks to reader M.K. from Denmark.)
