Visual Studio Community

Visual Studio Community is a fully-featured, extensible, free IDE for creating modern applications for Android, iOS, Windows, as well as web applications and cloud services.

Try out Visual Studio Community for Windows PC for a fully-featured and extensible IDE; An updated alternative to Visual Studio Express.

A brand-new workload-based installer optimizes your installation to make sure you have everything you need and nothing you don’t. Code with confidence in your language, find and fix code issues quickly, and refactor with ease.

Debug to quickly find and fix bugs. Find and diagnose performance issues with profiling tools.

Tools for Apache Cordova, Xamarin, and Unity available for download to enable code, debug, test, share, and reuse for more platforms.

Develop for the web with ASP.NET, Node.js, Python, and JavaScript. Use with powerful web frameworks such as AngularJS, jQuery, Bootstrap, Django, and Backbone.js.

Manage your source code in Git repos hosted by any provider, including GitHub. Or use the app Team Services to manage code alongside bugs and work items for your whole project. When you sign in to Visual Studio Community, you get access to a broad set of free developer tools, selected Xamarin University courses on-demand, Pluralsight training, Azure credits, and more as part of VisualStudio Dev Essentials.

Features and Highlights

Customized installer
Develop for WPF, WinForms, ASP.NET, Universal Windows Platform, Win32, Android, iOS, and many more platforms all from one IDE with everything you need.

Get to coding faster
With faster project load times and performance improvements, you can get to working faster with your favorite languages such as C/C++, C#, Visual Basic, F#, Python, and more.

Improved productivity
Code editing, navigation, and debugging are made easier with features like XAML Edit & Continue, improved IntelliSense, enhanced code refactoring, live code analysis, and the ability to open any folder without needing projects or solutions.

Modern Web
Tap into modern web development with JavaScript, ASP.NET, Python, and more with powerful coding tools like rich IntelliSense completions, first-class debugging, and performance profilers.

Build for Windows
Create apps and games for Windows using powerful new platform features like UI analysis and debugging, Windows 10 mobile emulators, DirectX graphics tools.

Vibrant ecosystem
Access to thousands of extensions that Express lacks, such as GitHub Extension, Resharper, Visual Assist. And Web Essentials.

Alternatives

Visual Studio Code - A free, open-source code editor developed by Microsoft.

Sublime Text - A lightweight and fast code editor known for its speed and responsiveness.

Brackets - An open-source code editor developed by Adobe.

Notepad++ - A popular and lightweight code editor for Windows PC.

Pinegrow - A web design and development tool that focuses on visual editing.

PROS

• Free for Individual Developers
• Powerful IntelliSense & Debugging
• Extensive Language Support
• Integrated Git & Version Control
• Rich Extensions & Customization

CONS

• Heavy on System Resources
• Long Installation Time
• Occasional Performance Lag
• Complex UI for Beginners
• Limited for Large Teams

Note: Cannot be used in an enterprise environment. Limited functionality in the demo version.

Also Available: Download Visual Studio Community for Mac