Five Use Cases for Visual Studio 2013 Community
Visual Studio 2013 Community Edition is a fully featured version of Visual Studio free for small teams and open source development. Compared to the previously available free edition of Visual Studio (Express), the Community edition combines tools for Web, desktop, cloud and mobile development in one product, and adds support of Visual Studio extensions. With Visual Studio Community, developers can access thousands of extensions available in Visual Studio Gallery, such as Web Essentials, Cordova tools, ReSharper and others.
Who can benefit from this new edition of Visual Studio? Here are some scenarios.
StudentsVisual Studio Community is free for students and provides all the tools they need to learn software development skills and master modern technologies. For example, Visual Studio can be used together with Microsoft Azure to explore Cloud computing capabilities, host private sites or use machine learning for researches. |
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Open source project developersWith Python, Node.js and JavaScript support, free Community edition is an excellent development environment for open source projects. The Python Tools for Visual Studio plugin supports editing, IntelliSense, local and remote debugging, profiling. |
Indie game developersUnity is one of the widely used 3D gaming engines, it is available in several editions, including free Personal edition and offers for educational institutes. Visual Studio 2013 Tools for Unity extension provides Unity integration that allows development and debugging of Unity games within Visual Studio. |
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Mobile startupCross-platform development is a norm in the modern mobile world. With Cordova and Xamarin tools, developers can quickly prototype solutions and reach multiple platforms and wide audience. Cordova and Xamarin use different approaches for cross-platform development but both solutions provide deep integration with Visual Studio and rich development experience, including debugging and emulators support. |
Small team of Web developersVisual Studio Community is not just for individual developers. Small product development teams can use this edition together with Visual Studio Online to coordinate team activities, manage project backlog and run builds and continuous integration. |
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Your Turn
Do you use Visual Studio 2013 Community in a different scenario? Share your experience with the community!