Why the Community Edition of Visual Studio 2013 is Thrilling for You and Telerik DevCraft

You probably heard the news about the availability of a free version of Visual Studio 2013 a few weeks ago. This announcement is quite exciting, because (for the first time) Microsoft is trying to really offer the great .NET framework and associated tools to indie developers, smaller dev shops and students. Probably the most important part of the announcement (for us) is that the Community version allows extensions. Adding extensions was not possible with the previous free editions of Visual Studio, a.k.a. the Express editions. If you wanted to use a third-party product in your daily development (like Telerik DevCraft), you had to buy a non-Express edition of Visual Studio. Today, if your use meets Mircrosoft’s license requirements, you can save that cash and just use the latest and greatest of Visual Studio with your favorite Telerik tools and extensions (plus any other third-party tools, of course).

Will Telerik DevCraft Tools Work with It?

Yes. All of the Telerik .NET tools work with Visual Studio Community 2013: UI for ASP.NET AJAX, MVC, Silverlight, WPF, Windows Forms, Windows Universal, Windows Phone (phew, so much UI). It was illegal to use those with Visual Studio Express. But now you are good to go with Visual Studio Community 2013. Once you install any of them, you will get the Telerik extensions for Visual Studio in place and the toolbox will be populated, then let the drag-and-drop development start with no issues or limitations.

You can build reports using the design surface of Visual Studio with Telerik Reporting. Install JustCode to get more productive with its code navigation, code analyses, code generation, code cleaning, refactoring abilities, unit test runner and so on. Or get the JustDecompile extension for Visual Studio to quickly decompile referenced assemblies in a Visual Studio project. Telerik JustMock and JustTrace also work seamlessly in Visual Studio Community 2013.

Will You Be Using the New Edition of Visual Studio?

What do you think about the new free version of Visual Studio? Do you plan to use it? Will the new edition save you some $$$? Just leave a comment below.