
Get Visual Studio Community 2013 for Free - altaweelali
http://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-community-vs?loc=zTS1z&prod=zOTprodz&tech=zSdz&prog=zOTprogz&type=znewsz&media=zOTmediaz&country=zUSz
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Ecio78
Important info:

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.

~~~
sergiotapia
Yeah all this licensing mumbo-jumbo is what made me drop .NET from my stack
and this is what's going to keep me from coming back.

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sz4kerto
Have you ever looked into GPL? It's a tad longer than this.

~~~
Maakuth
Well, that is bound not to be the binding legal document here, there must be
quite a long contract that actually defines the terms. Nothing to do with
Microsoft necessarily, that's just how lawyers are.

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bovermyer
A lot of people seem to think that steps like this are just Microsoft catching
up. Which, I suppose, they are. But there's something else here too - this
kind of thing, where Microsoft is opening up to the open source community,
releasing more free tools, releasing more open source projects, all started
happening when Satya Nadella took the reins.

I think what we're looking at is a CEO that gets it and is trying to move as
fast as possible to turn the monolithic company around. That's no mean feat,
considering how long Microsoft has gone with everything being behind closed
doors in a licensing maze.

I for one approve of this trend.

~~~
elboru
Staya Nadella might be accelerating things, but Microsoft has been moving
through this direction before Staya's arrival (ASP.NET MVC was open sourced in
April 2009), actually I see Staya Nadella taking reins as another step
Microsoft took to be more open.

~~~
keithg
Scott Hanselman has been an outspoken advocate for this type of move within
Microsoft. Hard to say how much influence he has had, but I think it's
probably not insignificant.

~~~
teh_klev
And as I mentioned in another comment, Scott Guthrie. He really seemed to give
the Dev Div a boot up the backside when he took over.

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atlantic
I've been using VS 2013 Community for a few days now, for C#/MVC work. I can't
see the difference in relation to the paid version. All the features I
habitually make use of are available. A very nice surprise.

~~~
aquadrop
Essentially, they just made Pro version free for small companies and
individual developers, and open source of all size.

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rl3
This is a surprising move, won't it result in a large drop in their MSDN
subscriber base?

I may be wrong here, but as far as I can tell, the only reason to maintain an
MSDN subscription for the purposes of Visual Studio (assuming you're eligible
to use Visual Studio Community 2013) is if you want the features in editions
beyond Professional, you want to be on the bleeding edge, or you want the
peripheral perks of subscribing.

Personally I think it's a fantastic decision, I'm just surprised Microsoft is
actually doing it. Hopefully they will be timely in releasing a Community
edition for future versions of Visual Studio.

Also, this move is pretty great for startups. I think it also puts BizSpark in
a better position. Most early stage startups will no longer have to jump
through hoops trying to get into BizSpark, nor prematurely start the clock
ticking on that until they're ready.

One of my major peeves with BizSpark has been the requirement that your
company's public-facing site be more than just a "Coming Soon" page. While I
can see the reasoning, it's kind of annoying when you haven't launched yet,
you'd prefer to focus on your product, and you want to make said site _using
Visual Studio_ anyways.

~~~
sequence7
The main value of an MSDN subscription is all the subscriber downloads and the
Azure credits you get.

Want to try out or develop against any piece of MS software, just download it
from the MSDN portal and off you go. Want to test out provisioning with Azure
or fire up a server to test or dev against, just use your Azure credits. You
can happily run a couple of small servers with the Azure credits.

If you just want Visual Studio you could always buy it on its own for much
less than a subscription.

~~~
badgersandjam
I get bugger all Azure credits with Pro. £35 a month which isn't enough to
spin up one VM with 1.75Gb of RAM for a month...

If I grab MAPS sub and VS community I'm well up on cash.

~~~
sequence7
£35 a month will get you four A0 Windows/Linux instances or a single Linux A1
and a single Windows/Linux A0 running full time for the month.

[http://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/details/virtual-
mac...](http://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/details/virtual-
machines/#Windows)

~~~
badgersandjam
Yeah I know. The A0 with windows server is painful. If I got an A1 for £30 I'd
break even on renting a dedicated box. That's the big pain.

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ElongatedTowel
Should msvc be the go-to compiler on Windows for C++? I was getting back into
the language and was quickly reminded of all the compiler and dependency
hazzle, especially when coding for several operating systems. On top of that
some older solutions aren't even a good idea anymore, like the whole mingw vs
mingw-w64 crap.

Seems to me that from a precompiled binary and build management perspective
it's just the easiest way to use whatever is best supported on each platform.
Which seems to be clang on MacOS, gcc/clang on Linux and msvc on Windows.

I had to use chromiumembeddedframework in one project and compiling it with
gcc or clang on Windows isn't even a choice. Even if there is a way to get it
to work, it's a huge project that takes quite a lot of resources to build.
Even if it was easy, prebuild is still a lot faster.

With the newest version always beeing free and tools like CMake beeing able to
generate projects the only downside I can see is that msvc would dictate the
features I'm able to use.

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drapper
In my previous experiences with VS Express the installed version took about
10GBs of disk space and included plenty of stuff I didn't want or cared about,
like various versions of MS SQL Server, support for VB, different runtimes for
.NET, etc.

Anyone knows if there's a way to avoid that? I'd like to have "just an IDE",
for node and web development.

~~~
BloatControl
Welcome to the Mickysoft BloatWorld. And do not forget to get the new 700+ MB
Update, so you can live up to even more bloat - this update alone flatulated
5+ GB on the harddrives I have seen.

This is not just about "style" or "personal preference", it is a serious
problem: it eats too much energy and therefore destroys the planet, millions
of old but perfectly usable devices are transformed into highly dangerous
toxic waste because Windows 8x is too slow for them and - most important - we
loose a whole generation of brains as too many young developers grow up in the
perception that this kind of bloat is acceptable, what is a real catastrophe
for the whole industry - it is so hard to find people that can program without
crutches and really know what they are doing.

We should more actively avoid this bloat and support better alternatives.

Yes, Mickysoft jobs pay the bills for many, but this happened because we
tolerated this too long and alternatives were too weak. Nowadays it is
possible to replace all the legacy MS waste that still exists in many
companies with better solutions.

~~~
badgersandjam
It pays the bills because it solves problems.

I run windows on a 4 year old thinkpad. It's 8.1 on an i5. It goes like
lightning and the battery lasts twice as long as Ubuntu does on the same kit
even after powertop has been frigged with.

Also my wife's android handset has 25% more battery capacity than my Lumia 630
and lasts half as long.

YMMV but what you state is not factual and merely a slashdot-esque troll.

------
numo16
Previous comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8595948](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8595948)

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gregd
I have often wondered why Microsoft wouldn't just release all versions of VS
for free. VS is arguably the go-to tool for developing on the other paid
Microsoft products (SQL Server, Azure), so it makes sense that this would
attract MORE people to those paid offerings..

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melling
What's the best option for getting Windows and running it in a VM? I have a
Mac but would like to try Visual Studio.

~~~
mateuszf
VirtualBox, but you will still need to buy Windows with license.

~~~
rikkus
Or wait for Windows 10 when it'll be free for personal users.

~~~
AlexeyBrin
> Or wait for Windows 10 when it'll be free for personal users.

Do you have any reference for this ? Will Microsoft release Windows 10 for
free for individuals ?

~~~
bovermyer
Here's a written reference:
[http://news.filehippo.com/2014/10/windows-10-will-free-
perso...](http://news.filehippo.com/2014/10/windows-10-will-free-personal-
users%E2%80%8F/)

I believe it was also mentioned in the Windows 10 announcement keynote.

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pherocity_
How is this different from Express versions?

~~~
pjmlp
Besides what is referred in sibling posts:

\- DirectX debugging tools, including GPGPU

\- Parallel code debugging

\- MFC and ATL for those that still need to support such type of applications

\- 64 bit compilers

\- DDK integration

\- Sharepoint integration

~~~
patja
"Debug / Attach to process" is another really significant feature that
Community Edition has that was omitted from Express

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ehosca
does this require a particular version of the .net framework to be installed?

~~~
numo16
Pretty sure it will install .net 4.5 if you don't have it already during
installation.

~~~
keithg
Yes. All pre-requisites will be downloaded during install.

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markwong
not sure if Dephi (Embarcadero) would do the same?

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eridal
their download button points to an .exe file, no matter with OS are you
running

~~~
Maakuth
It's a Windows application though, what are you going to do with it if you
can't run exe?

~~~
eridal
Exactly. They don't even care of hiding that button for others OS

Also, why the hate?

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motters
That's free as in price, not as in freedom.

~~~
rootlocus
Sure, I'll have a free beer, thank you!

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jarun
Another bloatware from MS :) Seriously... I crawls even on Windows... which
you need to buy! ;)

~~~
rootlocus
I haven't realized hackernews makes comments even harder to read once they get
enough downvotes. Thanks for writing the lowest rated comment I've seen so far
:D

