Microsoft has announced that they are restructuring the way they sell Visual Studio. Starting with VS 2015, there will only be three main SKUs or editions: Community, Professional w/MSDN, and Enterprise w/MSDN. The most expensive edition will cost you $5,999 for the first year, $2,569 per year after that. Previously it was roughly twice that price: $13,299 to start with a $4,249 yearly renewal.
Developers holding an active subscription to VS Premium or Ultimate edition will automatically be upgrade to Enterprise edition when it is released. This includes holders of full licenses as well as those who received their subscriptions via BizSpark or the Microsoft Partner Network.
Debugging and Diagnostics
IntelliTrace and Code Map for debugging will be Enterprise only features. Nearly everything else in this category will be available in the free version of Visual studio.
Testing
The Community and Professional editions of Visual Studio only have the bare minimum when it comes to testing. They get Microsoft’s unit testing library and the extension framework needed to integrate third-party libraries such as NUnit.
Visual Studio Test Professional adds a handful of capabilities, but the vast majority of features require the Enterprise edition. This includes:
- Web Load & Performance Testing
- IntelliTest
- Microsoft Fakes (Unit Test Isolation)
- Code Coverage
- Coded UI Testing
IDE Features
CodeLens has been promoted to VS Professional edition. This extension reveals useful information about methods including where it is being used, whether or not its tests are passing, who modified it, and what tickets/bugs affected it.
Code Clone, the duplicate code detector, will remain an Enterprise level feature.
All other features in this category, including Blend, will be available at the Community level.
Architecture and Modeling
Architecture diagrams, including UML, are an Enterprise only feature. But a read-only version of Code Maps will be available at the Community level.
Team Foundation Server
Nearly all TFS tools are offered at the Professional level. The exceptions are Release Management and Web Based Test Case Management, which will be Enterprise only.
Collaboration Tools
All of the collaboration tools are offered at the community level, including tooling support for code reviews.
MSDN Benefits
As before, the full version of Visual Studio will received greater MSDN benefits including a copy of Office Pro, access to all of their server platforms, and more credits for Azure.
