Visual Studio Professional for free. Do my eyes deceive me? Microsoft is now offering free download full edition of Visual Studio Professional. Aptly named, Visual Studio Community Edition. It is the fully featured professional edition with some license limitations for enterprise users.

With all the hype about free and open source software, Microsoft have gotten their fair share of criticism in this area. Microsoft now offers the new Visual Studio Community for Visual Studio 2013 and Visual Studio 2015 for free. That's right, you read it, for free.

Visual Studio Express

Previous free versions of Visual Studio known as Express were very limiting. First all the languages were in separate downloads and editions

• Visual Basic Express
• Visual C++ Express
• Visual C# Express
• Visual J# Express
• Visual Web Developer Express
• Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone

There are also other limitations like no extensibility, use of third party tools and plugins.

Visual Studio Community Edition

Microsoft have released a new free version of Visual Studio called Visual Studio Community Edition. Some might think that it is just a rebranding of the Visual Studio Express editions. But no! It is in fact Visual Studio Professional. That's right, the community edition has all the same productivity, functionality and features as the professional edition. And it is all free.

Download both Visual Studio Community 2013 and Visual Studio 2015 (preview) here:

Visual Studio Community 2013

Visual Studio 2015

There is a huge difference between Visual Studio Express and the aptly named;Visual Studio Community edition. The new version is extensible, so get access to the over 5,100 extensions now in the Visual Studio ecosystem. It is also a complete full edition with all the included languages. Also, there are no restriction, you can use it to develop commercial and non-commercial products.

While the two editions share the same features today, the licensing terms determine who can use this product. You can use Visual Studio Community Edition in open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios. In the enterprise it is limited to 5 users. Read the licensing terms in the link above.

Check out more information on Visual Studio at VisualStudio.com

Conclusion

Visual Studio, at least for me, is the best IDE out there. With this new free version of Visual Studio, any one can now make use of the full features of Visual Studio Professional.

Now you and I have no excuse. So let's get coding.