Marc Gregoire’s Blog

Microsoft announced the availability of Visual Studio Community 2013.
This Community edition replaces the Express editions.
You no longer have to decide which Express edition to use because the Community edition supports all kinds of development, web, mobile, desktop, …
Visual Studio Community 2013 includes all the functionality of Visual Studio Professional 2013.
Unlike the Express editions, the Community edition supports extensions.

Of course there are some restrictions on who can use this edition, but not many:

Here’s how individual developers can use Visual Studio Community:

• Any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community to create their own free or paid apps.

Here’s how Visual Studio Community can be used in organizations:

• An unlimited number of users within an organization can use Visual Studio Community for the following scenarios: in a classroom learning environment, for academic research, or for contributing to open source projects.
• For all other usage scenarios: In non-enterprise organizations, up to 5 users can use Visual Studio Community. In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or > $1MM in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.

Download and get more information from here.

Visual Studio 2013 Update 1 has been released.

The following are Visual C++ related bug fixes:

• Assume that you edit a dialog that contains at least one picture control in Resource Editor. After you save the file, the project can no longer be compiled.
• When you edit multiple resources in Resource Editor, Visual Studio crashes randomly.
• Addresses some Visual C++ automatic formatting issues.
• Visual C++ IDE does not work as expected if there is an unexpected registry subkey under the following registry key:
  HKCU\Software\Microsoft\VisualSTudio\12.0\FileExtensionMapping
• When you try to link with PGO on amd64_x86 complier, Visual Studio crashes.

Update 1 is a rather small update. A list of all the fixes can be found here.

Download the update from here.

S. Somasegar said that they are well underway on Visual Studio 2013 Update 2, their first major feature update for VS2013, which they are looking forward to delivering this spring.

The Visual Studio 2013 Preview has a number of UI improvements compared to 2012.
There is again a bit more color in the IDE, and borders between controls and windows are more visible.
Below is an example of the Solution Explorer

Read this blog post on the Visual Studio team blog for more details.