At its Connect() conference, Microsoft officially announced Visual Studio 2013 Community, the free version of its popular developer toolkit. This version allows for full extensibility. 
The company also released Visual Studio 2015 Preview and .NET 2015 Preview to showcase new features in Visual Studio Online and support for programming on iOS and Android directly from Visual Studio. It also announced that .Net is becoming open source and officially cross-platform, running on Windows, Linux, and Mac.
You can download Visual Studio 2013 Community for free.
What's in Visual Studio Community 2013?
- Extended editing, code analysis, and debugging support, compilers for managed languages, C++, and more
- Programming on every platform: Android, iOS, and Windows Phone with free Visual Studio tools for Apache Cordova extension for Web applications
- Support for open-source workflows (Git)
- Azure SDK integration and modern app analytics as well as telemetry with Application Insights
- Access all Visual Studio 2013 extensions in the Visual Studio Gallery
Developers can build with these tools, features and functions in applications for devices, desktop and cloud through the same programming environment!
If you're interested, you can watch the on-demand sessions from Connect(); or the Visual Studio Community 2013 video to see what you can do with this version.
