At its Connect() developer event in New York today, Microsoft made a couple of developer-friendly announcements. First of them being, it is now open sourcing most of the .NET framework, and the other one being, a free, unrestricted version of Visual Studio has also been launched, for small teams.
S.Somasegar, Microsoft’s Corporate V.P. for its developer division announced,
Today, we are taking the next big step for the Microsoft developer platform, opening up access to .NET and Visual Studio to an even broader set of developers by beginning the process of open-sourcing the full .NET server core stack and introducing a new free and fully-featured edition of Visual Studio.
Microsoft’s developer tools have never really been know for their cross-platform friendliness, and in a move to rename that tag, Microsoft also announced that it is planning to take its entire .NET framework to Mac and Linux as well.
As a part of its .NET open-sourcing project, Microsoft has already begun to make the entire .NET Core server stack open source. Several key components, like ASP.NET and the C# compiler have been open sourced previously, and today, in addition to that, it is releasing several additional components or the Core .NET framework.
You can access the entire repository on GitHub, by clicking here.
As for the free and unrestricted Visual Studio edition, Microsoft has aptly named it, Visual Studio Community 2013. It is a new free, fully-featured edition of Visual Studio that lets developers target any platform, from desktop and mobile to web and cloud. Visual Studio Community 2013 also supports full Visual Studio extensibility, offering access to the ecosystem of over 5000 extensions. Though access to its enterpise feature is still restricted, you can use it to build any commercial or non-commercial projects. Number of users er team is limited to five.
Speaking on the same, Somasegar says,
Visual Studio Community 2013 is a new, free and fully featured edition of Visual Studio, available today, with access to the full Visual Studio extensibility ecosystem and support for targeting any platform, from devices and desktop to web and cloud services.
In addition to broad platform support in a unified Visual Studio experience, Visual Studio Community 2013 also includes dozens of great Visual Studio tools, including Peek, Blend, Code Analysis, Graphical Debugging and full C# refactoring.
