Which version of Microsoft Visual Studio is best for following an online C course?
List of all C#, .Net framework and Visual studio versions (Damn you Microsoft with all your version numbers)
I wonder who is in charge of naming and versioning over there!
Naming is a marketing thing. Versioning is a technical thing. Don't confuse the two.
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/ March 10, 2026
/ March 10, 2026
A few online courses that were recommended in other reddit threads here have suggested downloading Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Express but that is not supported anymore. The MS website warns that there may by security risks. MS suggests to use 'Visual Studio Community Edition' instead, an IDE which has support for C++ along with other languages.
Has anyone downloaded 'Visual Studio Community Edition' to help in an online course and found it useful?
There are 2 major differences.
- Technical
- Licensing
Technical, there are 3 major differences:
First and foremost, Community doesn't have TFS support.
You'll just have to use git (arguable whether this constitutes a disadvantage or whether this actually is a good thing).
Note: This is what MS wrote. Actually, you can check-in&out with TFS as normal, if you have a TFS server in the network. You just cannot use Visual Studio as TFS SERVER.
Second, VS Community is severely limited in its testing capability.
Only unit tests. No Performance tests, no load tests, no performance profiling.
Third, VS Community's ability to create Virtual Environments has been severely cut.
On the other hand, syntax highlighting, IntelliSense, Step-Through debugging, GoTo-Definition, Git-Integration and Build/Publish are really all the features I need, and I guess that applies to a lot of developers.
For all other things, there are tools that do the same job faster, better and cheaper.
If you, like me, anyway use git, do unit testing with NUnit, and use Java-Tools to do Load-Testing on Linux plus TeamCity for CI, VS Community is more than sufficient, technically speaking.
Licensing:
A) If you're an individual developer (no enterprise, no organization), no difference (AFAIK), you can use CommunityEdition like you'd use the paid edition (as long as you don't do subcontracting)
B) You can use CommunityEdition freely for OpenSource (OSI) projects
C) If you're an educational insitution, you can use CommunityEdition freely (for education/classroom use)
D) If you're an enterprise with 250 PCs or users or more than one million US dollars in revenue (including subsidiaries), you are NOT ALLOWED to use CommunityEdition.
E) If you're not an enterprise as defined above, and don't do OSI or education, but are an "enterprise"/organization, with 5 or less concurrent (VS) developers, you can use VS Community freely (but only if you're the owner of the software and sell it, not if you're a subcontractor creating software for a larger enterprise, software which in the end the enterprise will own), otherwise you need a paid edition.
The above does not consitute legal advice.
See also:
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/262916/understanding-visual-studio-community-edition-license
Check the following: https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/compare/ Visual studio community is free version for students and other academics, individual developers, open-source projects, and small non-enterprise teams (see "Usage" section at bottom of linked page). While VSUltimate is for companies. You also get more things with paid versions!
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C# 1.0 released with .NET 1.0 and VS2002 (January 2002)
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C# 1.1 & 1.2 released with .NET 1.1 and VS2003 (April 2003).
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C# 2.0 released with .NET 2.0 and VS2005 (November 2005).
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C# 3.0 released with .NET 3.5 and VS2008 & 2010 (November 2007).
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C# 4.0 released with .NET 4 and VS2010 (April 2010).
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C# 5.0 released with .NET 4.5 and VS2012 & 2013 (August 2012).
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C# 6.0 released with .NET 4.6 and VS2015 (July 2015).
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C# 7.0 Not yet released. (4.6.3? and 2017? )
Now Visual Studio versions:
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Visual Studio 97 Version 5.0
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Visual Studio 6.0 Version 6.0
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Visual Studio .NET 2002 Version 7.0
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Visual Studio .NET 2003 Version 7.1
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Visual Studio 2005 Version 8.0
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Visual Studio 2008 Version 9.0
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Visual Studio 2010 Version 10.0
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Visual Studio 2012 Version 11.0
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Visual Studio 2013 Version 12.0
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Visual Studio 2015 Version 14.0
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Visual Studio 2017 Version 15.0
I wonder who is in charge of naming and versioning over there! JK ;)
Edit: Now with CodeNames:
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Visual Studio 97 CodeName Boston
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Visual Studio 6.0 CodeName Aspen
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Visual Studio .NET 2002 CodeName Rainier
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Visual Studio .NET 2003 CodeName Everett
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Visual Studio 2005 CodeName Whidbey
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Visual Studio 2008 CodeName Orcas
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Visual Studio 2010 CodeName Dev10/Rosario
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Visual Studio 2012 CodeName Dev11
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Visual Studio 2013 CodeName Dev12
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Visual Studio 2015 CodeName Dev14
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Visual Studio 2017 CodeName Dev15