I am a .Net developer in a Corporate IT job, so I am exactly in the demographic Microsoft aims for as users (not buyers though). Visual Studio is hands down the best IDE, period.
The pricing is absolutely, absolutely insane.
If you're just doing basic development, the community edition is actually really good and completely free.
They are actually announcing a new product lineup (1) and not a new release for actual download. The article predicts that the actual release (RTM) will be in the summer. The current (beta) release is still CTP 6 which was already announced a few weeks ago.
I suppose this is a press release intended more for the corporate IT manager planning his purchasing budget (what SKU do I buy/upgrade) rather than developers to actually install and play with today.
(1) e.g. Premium and Ultimate editions will be merged into one Enterprise edition
The goal for us was to make sure that folks that do pay for MSDN Subscriptions know what we are doing for Visual Studio 2015 wave.
If anyone actually wants to try the latest test version of Visual Studio 2015 you can do so here:
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/downloads/visual-studio-2...
Also we have detailed release notes on what's new in Visual Studio here: - https://www.visualstudio.com/news/vs2015-preview-vs - https://www.visualstudio.com/news/vs2015-vs
Therefore, it's not unreasonable to read their verbage of the first sentence [with interpretation in brackets] as:
>Introducing the newly announced Visual Studio 2015 product line [so go and download the new RTM iso image that's in the link below], including the all-new Visual Studio Enterprise with MSDN, Visual Studio Professional with MSDN, and the free Visual Studio Community edition.
... instead of reading it like Microsoft intends:
>Introducing the newly announced Visual Studio 2015 product line [and you've already got the latest beta version last week so don't go looking for the RTM until summer], including the all-new Visual Studio Enterprise with MSDN, Visual Studio Professional with MSDN, and the free Visual Studio Community edition.
A bit of Pavlov's conditioning based on the last 3 VS releases makes the bold headlines a little confusing. The fact that it's on HN's front page makes it seem like a more newsworthy announcement than it actually is. The expected summer RTM would be more typical of rising to the HN front page(1). This announcement of reshuffling SKU editions doesn't seem to warrant the hype of being voted to the front page -- unless -- people misunderstand what Microsoft is actually announcing. :-)
(1) it was #2 on the front page before I wrote this post. In the 5 minutes it took to write this post and save it, it's now #236. I suppose an moderator pushed it down into oblivion as a service to HN readers.
We appreciate your support of our announcement though :).
Which makes Visual Studio actually attractive for a community edition (the express edition is deprecated though - that's a good thing).
>Visual Studio Express 2015 editions. (Non-enterprise customers are encouraged to check out Visual Studio Community 2015, which is also free and provides a more comprehensive solution)
There's actually not, Android is supported as a target, not a platform the IDE runs on.
> I am curious, are there people out there who use Android device to code? I tried a bit QPython but it was frustrating not to be able to use the app I created from outside of QPython.
There are IDEs that will let you develop and build APKs on Android that have been around and supported for a while, which I wouldn't expect if no one was using them (e.g., AIDE.) QPython isn't exactly the top-of-the-line in terms of coding environments that run on Android.
Edit: is iOS/Android building Xamarin or?
Edit2: Yep , this is Xamarin.
Interested in that. What's your "mobile stack"?
Although maybe I'm wrong: I don't know exactly how restricted the free Community edition is. Also, Resharper apparently works with the free Community edition so that's a huge plus.
> Q: Who can use Visual Studio Community?
> A: 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 > $1 Million US Dollars in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.
From another [article](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dorischen/archive/2014/11/12/q-amp-a...)
> 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.
Edit: formatting, can't figure out how to quote the text.
(Sorry, non-MSDN subscriber here)
Findings:
- There's a very bad (known) bug that renders the entire IDE unusable. If you attempt to modify the markup of certain databound elements (possibly others), an error message will pop up and the IDE will cease to function in a predictable manner
- The VS Android Emulator is great, but it needs a bit more work. For example, it modifies you network settings without notifying you (installs Virtual adapters). Now if something else modifies those settings, the Emulator will refuse to start. You have to poke around a bit with the Hyper-V manager to get things working again. They should have a "restore default settings" option. (My Emulator refuses to work now even after I removed and reinstalled it).
- The VS emulator would be better if it had a default "Shared" folder that could be used to transfer files between the device and host.
- You can't specify the port you want to run Ripple on. I believe they are planning on fixing this, but it's a big problem at the moment as VS will just choose randomly from 40 different ports, each time creating a new folder and recreating your local databases. This makes it hard to track down bugs, or continuing from a known state.
- Build support is very limited. You have to muck about with the project settings to do trivial things like redirecting output based on Project configuration
- The Javascript debugger needs work. It will sometimes break whenever a new Javascript file is loaded. Or it will break on lines where no breakpoints have been set, even though no (visible) error occurred.
Other than that the IDE seems more-or-less the same as what I'm used to in VS2013.
I can't wait until I can target builds against CoreCLR.
