Microsoft’s Visual Studio goes free

Microsoft has released a fully-featured version of development tool Visual Studio that smaller devs can download for free.

Visual Studio Community 2013 provides access to all features found in the premium edition, as well as access to the full extensibility ecosystem, according to Gamasutra.

Microsoft says that "any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community to create their own free or paid apps" for Windows, iOS and Android. Studios with less than five people may also use the Visual Studio for free.

However, any studios with more than five employees, or that make more than $1m in revenue per year, are not allowed to use Visual Studio Community, unless Microsoft agrees on a case-by-case basis.

Microsoft also announced it is working on making the full .NET server core stack open source, and expanding the open source .NET to run on Mac and Linux.