Community Edition

The new Visual Studio Community 2015 edition is a full-featured IDE similar to Professional but targeted toward students, small groups of developers, and open source contributors (and not enterprise teams). This version is free and available for immediate download. Note that Microsoft has also release a Visual Studio Community 2013 edition.

The former Express editions have been retired. These editions were also free, but they were feature limited. Community, student, and entrepreneurial developers should be pleased to know this new edition is nearly the same as Professional but just has licensing restrictions.

Being based on Professional opens community developers to all types of applications using the great productivity tools built in Visual Studio. Just as significant, it ensures the Community Edition supports Visual Studio plug-ins (more than 5,000 in existence) for using community extensions targeted at increasing productivity. It also allows developers to target multiple different platforms with this single tool.

The primary difference between the editions Community and Professional (outside of licensing and costs) are a few project types Microsoft has decided not to include with the Community Edition. These project types are targeted squarely at enterprise developers. They include SharePoint, Office, LightSwitch, and Cloud Business Apps. These type of solutions are outside the bounds of the solutions Microsoft sees students, hobbyists, and small groups needing to create.