In this post I am going to mention some free development tools and services offered by Microsoft which help .NET developers to set up their development environment from IDE to Version Control to Work Planning to Build and finally deployment
Visual Studio Community
- Free full-featured IDE with support for all different kinds of applications supported by the enterprise version of Visual Studio 2015
- Visual Studio Community supports all extensions (aka. plugins) including non-Microsoft extensions. Extensions can be found in Visual Studio Gallery.
- It can be used by Individual developers or team of 1-5 developers to develop commercial software.
- It can be downloaded from here
- I recommend to use Web Essentials 2015 extension for its features for web development
Visual Studio Code
- Free, cross-platform and lightweight code editor which can be used to develop ASP.NET 5 and Web applications on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX
- It can be download from here
- Visual Studio Code built on Electron which enables development of cross platform desktop applications using web technologies
Team Foundation Server Express (TFS)
- TFS Express is ALM tool with features such as Version control, and Plan and track your projects’ work using agile tools
- It can be installed on the developer’s machine
- Free for individuals and teams of five members or less
- It can be downloaded from here
Visual Studio Online (VSO)
- Visual Studio Online is the cloud/online version of Team Foundation Server
- Free for up to 5 users
- TFS & VSO have three access levels (Stakeholder, basic, and Advanced)
- Stakeholder users are free of charge with no limit, although they can add/modify work items and view dashboards
Microsoft Azure
- Azure is a cloud based Platform as a Service (PAAS) with services such as applications, databases, virtual machines and more
- Developers can host up to 10 web, mobile, and API applications for free
SQL Server Express
- The free SQL Server Express 2014 allows the developers to create databases up to 10 GB of data per each database
Finally, If you are looking for free training on Microsoft and Web Technologies, have a look at Microsoft Virtual Academy and Channel9
Hopefully, this post helps developers to get started quickly with .NET Platform
In the coming post, I will talk about some new changes in C# I found interesting and cool
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