BT

Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

Write for InfoQ

Topics

Choose your language

InfoQ Homepage News Massive Price Cut for Visual Studio 2015

Massive Price Cut for Visual Studio 2015

Bookmarks

Microsoft has announced that they are restructuring the way they sell Visual Studio. Starting with VS 2015, there will only be three main SKUs or editions: Community, Professional w/MSDN, and Enterprise w/MSDN. The most expensive edition will cost you $5,999 for the first year, $2,569 per year after that. Previously it was roughly twice that price: $13,299 to start with a $4,249 yearly renewal.

Developers holding an active subscription to VS Premium or Ultimate edition will automatically be upgrade to Enterprise edition when it is released. This includes holders of full licenses as well as those who received their subscriptions via BizSpark or the Microsoft Partner Network.

Debugging and Diagnostics

IntelliTrace and Code Map for debugging will be Enterprise only features. Nearly everything else in this category will be available in the free version of Visual studio.

Testing

The Community and Professional editions of Visual Studio only have the bare minimum when it comes to testing. They get Microsoft’s unit testing library and the extension framework needed to integrate third-party libraries such as NUnit.

Visual Studio Test Professional adds a handful of capabilities, but the vast majority of features require the Enterprise edition. This includes:

  • Web Load & Performance Testing
  • IntelliTest
  • Microsoft Fakes (Unit Test Isolation)
  • Code Coverage
  • Coded UI Testing

IDE Features

CodeLens has been promoted to VS Professional edition. This extension reveals useful information about methods including where it is being used, whether or not its tests are passing, who modified it, and what tickets/bugs affected it.

Code Clone, the duplicate code detector, will remain an Enterprise level feature.

All other features in this category, including Blend, will be available at the Community level.

Architecture and Modeling

Architecture diagrams, including UML, are an Enterprise only feature. But a read-only version of Code Maps will be available at the Community level.

Team Foundation Server

Nearly all TFS tools are offered at the Professional level. The exceptions are Release Management and Web Based Test Case Management, which will be Enterprise only.

Collaboration Tools

All of the collaboration tools are offered at the community level, including tooling support for code reviews.

MSDN Benefits

As before, the full version of Visual Studio will received greater MSDN benefits including a copy of Office Pro, access to all of their server platforms, and more credits for Azure.

Rate this Article

Adoption
Style

Hello stranger!

You need to Register an InfoQ account or or login to post comments. But there's so much more behind being registered.

Get the most out of the InfoQ experience.

Allowed html: a,b,br,blockquote,i,li,pre,u,ul,p

Community comments

  • Let me know ...

    by Mac Noodle,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    ... when it is $0. That is what i pay for my tools now.

  • Currency?

    by David Dawson,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    What are we talking here?

  • Re: Let me know ...

    by Dan Tines,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    I'd never hold back my work, productivity, or value by only using "free" tools. My time isn't free.

  • Re: Currency?

    by Jonathan Allen,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    US Dollars.

    Sorry about that.

  • Re: Let me know ...

    by Jonathan Allen,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    The "Community" edition is free.

  • Re: Currency?

    by David Dawson,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Thanks!

    while I tend to work in the non microsoft world, my experience of MS tooling as always been excellent, but the pricing a little high to buy in on a whim for commercial experimentation.

    This looks much better.

  • Per developer?

    by Behrang Saeedzadeh,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Is the pricing per developer? O_o?

  • Per developer?

    by Behrang Saeedzadeh,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    Is the pricing per developer? O_o?

  • Great IDE, just find it cheaper

    by Rachel Henderson,

    Your message is awaiting moderation. Thank you for participating in the discussion.

    I really like Visual Studio 2015. It's much more stable and noticeably faster than 2013. The UI is cleaner. So far no compatibility issues when opening previous projects. Really top grade software from Microsoft. It's just for me the price was outside of my budget. I searched around and found it on danarou com gift shop site. I am so glad that I did and now I can develop on a full Professional version on many devices. It's really a step forward for sure.

Allowed html: a,b,br,blockquote,i,li,pre,u,ul,p

Allowed html: a,b,br,blockquote,i,li,pre,u,ul,p

BT