Currently I explore the Visual Studio 2015 RC and realized that Xamarin Studio is integrated into Visual Studio and its installer. My Question is: Is Xamarin from now on free in Visual Studio?
Updated March 31st, 2016:
We have announced that Visual Studio now includes Xamarin at no extra cost, including Community Edition, which is free for individual developers, open source projects, academic research, education, and small professional teams. There is no size restriction on the Community Edition and offers the same features as the Pro & Enterprise editions. Read more about the update here: https://blog.xamarin.com/xamarin-for-all/
Be sure to browse the store on how to download and get started: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/pricing/ and there is a nice FAQ section: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/support/
Yes, Xamarin is now free in Visual Studio
I asked the same question to Xamarin support team, they replied with following:
You can develop an app with Xamarin for commercial usage - there is no extra charge! We only require you to comply with Visual Studio's licensing terms,
which means that in companies of less than 250 employees with less than $1million USD annual revenue, you may use Visual Studio completely free (including Xamarin) for up to 5 developers.
However after you pass those barriers, you would need a Visual Studio license (which includes Xamarin).
Refer the screenshot below.
Visual Studio 2015 does include Xamarin Starter edition https://xamarin.com/starter
Xamarin Starter is free and allows developers to build and publish simple apps with the following limitations:
Contain no more than 128k of compiled user code (IL)
Do NOT call out to native third party libraries (i.e., developers may not P/Invoke into C/C++/Objective-C/Java)
Built using Xamarin.iOS / Xamarin.Android (NOT Xamarin.Forms)
Xamarin Starter installs automatically with Visual Studio 2015, and works with VS 2012, 2013, and 2015 (including Community Editions).
When your app outgrows Starter, you will be offered the opportunity to upgrade to a paid subscription, which you can learn more about here: https://store.xamarin.com/
Seems like now it's free for small teams and students, according to Scott Hanselman post https://twitter.com/shanselman/status/715568774418595840
https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/pricing/
Visual Studio Community
FREE
A free, full-featured and extensible IDE for Windows users to create
Android and iOS apps with Xamarin, as well as Windows apps, web apps,
and cloud services.
Students
OSS development
Small teams
and
Xamarin Studio Community
FREE
A free, full-featured IDE for Mac users to create Android and iOS apps
using Xamarin.
Students
OSS development
Small teams
If you go to the visualstudio.com Visual Studio 2015 RC cross-platform and mobile apps page, then read and scroll to the bottom, it appears that Microsoft is including Xamarin, and upon installing it you do have, as James said, the Xamarin Starter edition. In 2015 RC go to Tools, Xamarin Account to see your Xamarin license. I do not know the limitations, or any expiration date, of this Starter Xamarin Account.
Still, I don't know about you, but the Visual Studio 2015 RC "Community" edition I installed expires in less than 180 days. (Check the Help menu, go to "About...", and click on your license status to check.)
Let's say Xamarin Starter edition is free, but Visual Studio 2015 "Community" has an expiration date. So the bigger question might be whether Visual Studio 2015 "Community" will be free.
Without Xamarin though, Microsoft is offering C++ tools for cross-platform development, but scroll down to the bottom of the page and you might be surprised or confused at the download link description.
Visual studio community edition is bundled with xamarin and which is free as well.
No, it only contains a free 30 day trial. But I think there would be a package if you buy Visual Studio + Xamarin.
Xamarin is now owned by Microsoft So it completely free to use on Windows and mac as well.
Yes, Microsoft announced that xamrin is now free with VS15 and other latest versions.
Visual Studio is now including Xamarin also. You can download Xamarin Studio but this link
Make sure to get the Community Edition. it's Free to use
I've done some research and found out that TFS 2013 has some limitations like no reporting, single server deployment, 5 devs etc. But I wonder if there would be any problem with using VS 2013 Pro with TFS 2013 Express.
To sum up :
Is there any problem with one of these two setups ? :
VS 2013 Pro (or Ultimate) - TFS 2013 Express - SQL Server Express
VS 2013 Community - TFS 2013 Express - SQL Server Express
Thanks in advance.
TFS is only limited to no reporting when you use SQL express which does not support those features.
If you have even a single MSDN licence they you are licenced to install TFS with SQL standard. That would give you the reporting capabilities as well.
Single server is also only a limitation of the free (without MSDN) version of TFS.
You can have as many MSDN licenced users AND 5 included users.
I do not believe that there are any issues with either configuration. However I would recommend that you use VSO indeed as you get TFS without having to use a server.
There is no relation between the "Express" name after Visual Studio and TFS. Visual Studio Express works perfectly fine with TFS Express as well as the fully licensed version of TFS and vice versa.
As Martin already mentions, if you have an MSDN subscription, you already have a full license to install and run Team Foundation Server.
If you don't have an MSDN subscription and do not own a Retail version of TFS, you can still use the free Express edition with a few limitations:
No Sharepoint integration
No report server integration
Limited in the number of users
Only a single server installation supported
You can always upgrade your Express installation to the full version at a later point in time.
Instead of the Express version, you should indeed consider visual-studio-online, while this also has a few limitations:
No reporting
No sharepoint integration
It has a number of advantages as well:
Much less administration required
Always up to date with the latest version
Online Build Service available
Integration into Azure
I use to work on MOSS 2007 and I recently migrated the site to sharepoint 2010 (without visual upgrade). I have access to test server and currently I am not having any technical tasks. I would like to know if there are any sites which posts tasks given by clients or practice development queries using sharepoint and Visual studio. I would like to understand and implement such tasks in my free time. So if any one can please suggest links for the same or even give me some task to perform for me to learn.
I found the follow links very useful to learn about SharePoint 2010 and they include exercises to do as well, so you can improve your knowledge.
SharePoint 2010 Developer Training Course (Download offline training course)
Get Started Developing on SharePoint 2010
Enjoy!
I am setting up a new development environment for a small team, currently we are only 2 developers, and mainly we will be using the following frameworks:-
Asp.net MVC framework to build some web application from scratch.
SharePoint 2010 or 2013 to build an intranet/extranet application.
So I have settled on the following development tools to be able to build asp.net MVC web applications + to extend and build SharePoint application:-
Visual studio 2012 for building the web applications for both MVC & SharePoint.
Team foundation server 2012, to have version control, bug tracking , etc.
My question is the following:-
Since I will need the SharePoint 2013 templates so I cannot go with the express version of visual studio 2012? since the VS express version does no provide enterprise features such as SharePoint templates.
But will using TFS express suit my situation?
I have read that Microsoft provides a free plan where I can get free Visual Studio Professional 2012 & Team Foundation Server with all the enterprise features since I have less than 5 users (in my case 2 developers) and of course I can upgrade the free plan when the team grow.
So will getting the free plan from Microsoft work well in my case, especially
for having the SharePoint templates inside the visual studio 2012?
Best Regards
Where can I find a bug-tracking system that integrates with Visual Studio 2010 as an addin, and supports online support (so that anonymous people can add bugs to the buglist)?
You could use TFS and write a simple web frontend utilizing the TFS webservices. Perhaps there are bugtrackers that support TFS integration.
Unfortunately, I do not know of other solutions integrated into VS.
I ended up building my own system based on a database and a webserver. I then created a Visual Studio Package (add-in) through the Visual Studio 2010 SDK for managing bugs that were synced live from the website.
Way better for my needs, and only took 1 week of development.