One of the key announcements at the Connect(); event today was the release of Visual Studio Community 2013, a new, free edition of Visual Studio. It allows a broader set of developers to use Visual Studio to target any platform, from desktop and mobile to web and cloud with fully-featured editing and debugging support.
Visual Studio Community 2013 includes the great functionality of Visual Studio Professional 2013, designed and optimized for individual developers, students, open source contributors, and small teams. As part of this promise, I am pleased to announce that you can use LightSwitch and Cloud Business Apps to develop apps with Visual Studio Community.
You can get started developing with the community edition with these two steps.
- Install Visual Studio Community 2013
- Install Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2013 – November Update using the Web Platform Installer.
Since Visual Studio Professional, Premium or Ultimate are in-place upgrades of Community, there is no need to install Community if you already have these products. We recommend updating to the latest tools that we’ve released today which contain several bug fixes.
- Install Visual Studio Update 4 RTM
- Install Office Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2013 – November Update using the Web Platform Installer
We hope that this will open up LightSwitch and Cloud Business Apps to a whole new set of customers that we can welcome to the Microsoft development community.
Enjoy!
-Sean Laberee, Principal PM Manager, Cloud Platform Tools Team