Microsoft has released a new, fully featured and free version of its Visual Studio program, opening up its set of tools for all developers. The key highlights of the announcement include open sourcing the full server-side .NET core stack, releasing the fully featured Visual Studio Community 2013 for free, launching the Visual Studio 2015 Preview and updating Visual Studio 2013.

There are some caveats to using Visual Studio Community 2013 though, while “any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community to create their own free or paid apps”, studios made up of more than five people or are alternatively making more than $1,000,000 in annual revenue, are not permitted to use the tools- although specific exceptions may be made in some situations.

The new Visual Studio provides developers with access to the full studio extensibility ecosystem, meaning users can develop paas for Windows, iOS and Android. Additionally, Microsoft is working on open-sourcing the full .NET server core stack while also expanding open source .NET to run on Mac OS X and Linux.

Those interested in reading more on the technical side of these updates can read Microsoft's official blog post, HERE.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Do we have any programmers among our readers? Have you messed around with Visual Studio before? If so, what is your take on these new updates?

Source: Gamasutra

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