

One of the toughest tasks for any developer working on a project involving a potentially large number of users is the ability to test at scale. Students can get a copy of Visual Studio Professional at no charge from the Microsoft Dreamspark site. If you’re a programmer wanting to learn Visual Studio, you can download one of the Visual Studio Express versions for free. Other versions of Visual Studio include Premium, Professional, Test Professional and Team Foundation Server. Some of the enterprise-level testing, such as cloud-based load testing, requires Visual Studio Ultimate. The traditional method of using Visual Studio still works and requires installing the software to a Windows machine. Support for Eclipse and Apple Xcode makes it possible to incorporate Linux and Apple developers as well. Visual Studio online integrates with Git if you choose to use that method of source control. Figure 1 shows the first screen you’ll see when launching a new project using the online version of Visual Studio. If they can’t control the network and the systems used for corporate work, they can’t control anything - at least in their minds.Ĭreating a new project using Visual Studio online is not significantly different than from a PC. Microsoft has gone to great lengths to make the process as secure as possible, but the human behind the keyboard still gives some IT security managers pause.

Many companies are risk averse and would never allow development of corporate applications to be done in an open environment. While developing using Web-based tools does have its advantages, it’s not possible in every situation. The power of a Web-based development tool makes it possible to do truly distributed development while maintaining the control offered through Microsoft Team Foundation Services. This tool brings the flexibility and scale of the cloud to provide anywhere access to both individual and teams of developers. One of the newest members of the Visual Studio 2013 family is Visual Studio online.

Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 is the latest and greatest version of the product, incorporating a number of new features for a broad range of development scenarios. You can even do Python development, which runs on a wide range of operating systems from within Visual Studio. Visual Studio also supports a wide range of other target platforms, including mobile and the Web. While it is possible to use some other tool, Visual Studio really has no competition when the target is Windows. In the vast majority of organizations the applications targeted at the Windows platform are developed using Microsoft Visual Studio.

Every enterprise IT organization develops and maintains some number of custom applications.
