There are several different SKUs of Visual Studio available at each release cycle. Starting with Visual Studio 2013, Microsoft added a Community Edition as a free alternative to the Professional Edition for students, open source developers, and small teams. Alongside Visual Studio 2015, Microsoft has also added a cross-platform code editor named Visual Studio Code.
For developers, the following are the current offerings of Visual Studio 2015:
Community Edition
Professional Edition
Enterprise Edition
You may recall that previous versions of Visual Studio also included a Premium Edition and Ultimate Edition. These two have been merged into the Enterprise Edition.
For a high-level overview of the various editions of Visual Studio, you may refer to the comparison table at the following URL:
https://www.visualstudio.com/products/vs-2015-product-editions
Before the Community Edition, many students, independent developers, and small teams used the free Express Edition. However, the Express Edition was missing many Pro features, such as extensions. Now, with the Community Edition, non-enterprise developers can get a full-featured IDE for cross-platform application development.
Better yet, the Community Edition opens the door to thousands of Visual Studio extensions. If you don't find what you need in the Visual Studio Gallery, you can also create your own extensions.
For enterprise developers and professional teams with more needs, you can choose from the Professional or Enterprise Editions. Beyond the full-IDE features of the Community Edition, the Professional Edition also gives you access to the CodeLens, Team Foundation Server (TFS), and Agile project planning tools. CodeLens offers a deeper look into your code history, while TFS can be used for source control and continuous integration.
The Enterprise Edition gives you all of the above, plus enterprise-grade tools for software architecture, modeling, testing, and code coverage.
For a detailed look at the various editions of Visual Studio, you may refer to the comparison table at https://www.visualstudio.com/products/compare-visual-studio-2015-products-vs .
To provide even more choice to developers today, Microsoft has started offering a cross-platform code editor aptly called Visual Studio Code. This new offering is free and available for your platform of choice: Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
Visual Studio Code is primarily made for web and cloud applications, such as ASP.NET web applications or Node.js backend code. But you are free to use it for other uses, such as Unity game development and cross-platform application development with most popular languages such as C++, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, and many others.
For those of you who are wondering, Visual Studio Code bears a striking resemblance to the popular Sublime Text and is a good alternative to it. The following screenshot shows Visual Studio Code:
Visual Studio Code:project.json
For more information on other languages, you may refer to https://code.visualstudio.com/Docs/languages .
All of these versions of Visual Studio 2015 and Visual Studio Code can be used for ASP.NET Core web application development. When you create a new project in Visual Studio 2015, you'll see project templates for an Empty project, a Web API project, and a Web Application project, as shown in the following screenshot. Visual Studio Code, on the other hand, is file/folder-based (as opposed to project/solution-based), so you can open a project's files by opening a folder that contains a supported project:
In addition to Visual Studio, you could also use Yeoman to create a new ASP.NET project to work on. Yeoman is a scaffolding tool that can help you generate various modern web apps, including ASP.NET. For more information on Yeoman, check out their website at http://yeoman.io .
This book will focus primarily on Visual Studio 2015. All the screenshots and instructions will use Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition and the Edge web browser running on Windows 10. If you use a different editor, operating system, or web browser, you will have to perform the equivalent steps for your own environment. The application code should remain the same, regardless of the platform.