Microsoft has just announced Visual Studio Community 2013. It’s pretty much a full copy of Visual Studio, which retails for well over £300, and you can use it to create applications for Windows, Android and iOS.
The deal is that it’s available for use by individuals, non-profit companies and teams of fewer than 5 developers, which covers an awful lot of amateur developers, clubs, schools, etc. Here’s the blurb from the page:
Q: Who can use Visual Studio Community?
A: Here’s how individual developers 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 > $1MM in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.
Visual Studio 2013 Community can be downloaded from http://www.visualstudio.com/en-gb/products/visual-studio-community-vs
