With Express you develop asp.net and other web apps (Express for Web) in different IDE's than you would developing a Windows Forms applicaiton (Express for Win Forms). You can develop a mix of different projects in the same solution on the same IDE.Why you would want Community (dito for VS Professional): With the exception for developing apps that you sell in the Windows Store.

Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2013 is a vast, full-featured product, and a must-have if you're a serious Windows developer who's also on a budget.Community is like a full version of Visual Studio Professional, only they don't allow you to develop for commercial purposes (through the licence agreement). Individuals and up to five people within non-enterprise organisations can use it to create free or paid applications, and everyone else can also use it for non-commercial purposes (teaching, open source products). The end result for us took up 15GB of hard drive space, and added more than 40 elements to the installed applications list on our test PC.Ĭommunity does put an enormous amount of power in your hands, though, and the licensing terms are generous, too. The tiny installer is just a stub, which took around 2 hours to download and install every feature of the full product on our test PC (this had a basic 8Mbps broadband connection, and would have been much faster if we'd avoided some of the optional downloads). This does make for an absolutely huge product. There's web tooling for ASP.NET, Node.js, and JavaScript, and Apache Cordova and Unity tools mean you can target iOS and Android, as well as Windows.īundled tools include Peek, Blend, Code Analysis and full C# refactoring, and if that's not enough then there's full access to Visual Studio's 5000+ extensions. Designers, editors, debuggers and profilers help to polish your work. You can code apps and applications in C++, C#, VB, F#, HTML5, Python, JavaScript and more. Microsoft Visual Studio Community 2013 is a very powerful development environment, essentially a revamped edition of Visual Studio Professional 2013 which is now available for (mostly) free.Īs you'll know if you ever looked at Visual Studio 2013, Community is a product with something for just about everyone.

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