Unbelievable, but…

Microsoft gives away its top IDE Visual Studio 2013 for free.
What may or shall I tell you about Visual Studio? For me, it is the best available IDE, for years now. Nothing less. It has cost several hundreds of dollars until lately.

And since November 2014, they are giving it away for free. And no, this is not a trimmed down version, like the former Express Editions. It is a full-featured one, having the nearly the same feature set as VS 2013 Professional. It’s called Visual Studio 2013 Community.

Features

It supports

• C++, C#, VB, F#, Python
• JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js
• ASP.NET
• HTML5, CSS
• WPF, MFC, Windows Forms
• Git, Mercurial, SVN, TFVS
• Cross-platform apps and cross-platform debugging, for iOS and Android
• Remote debugging on physical and simulated devices
• Azure
• First class extensibility. All extensions of VS Gallery are supported.
• Free work item tracking via VS online

License Terms

Only difference to VS 2013 Professional are the license terms.

• You may use VS 2013 Community for free if you are an individual developer.
• In non-enterprise organizations up to 5 users can use Visual Studio Community.
• In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or > $1M in annual revenue) no use is permitted beyond open source, academic research and classroom learning environment scenarios.

Links

See more details there:

• MS Q & A about VS 2013 Community
• Download Visual Studio 2013 Community
• A video discussing VS 2013 Community