Hopefully you have all been enjoying the fantastic game lineup on Xbox One. While we have been busy with Halo 5, Rise of the Tomb Raider and all of the other recently released games, Microsoft has been busy. The holiday shopping season is about to begin, consoles and games are making their way to the stores and oh, by the way, they helped to make software development a whole lot more accessible. No matter how many people you have on your team or your budget,you have access to more developer tools now than any other point in modern history.
At Microsoft’s Connect(); 2015 event hosted in New York City, announced that the code for Visual Studio is now open source and unveiled a free Visual Studios Dev Essentials package. There is also a new marketplace for Visual Studios, cloud subscriptions and release candidates for .NET 5 and ASP.NET 5.
Microsoft Visual Studio is an integrated development environment, or IDE. Developers can use Visual Studio to create software for Windows, web sites or even video games. Even studios owned by Sony use Visual Studio when developing games for their consoles.
Not only is Visual Studio Dev Essentials free for aspiring developers, it can even be used for platforms other than Windows. iOS, Android or even Linux applications can be developed through Visual Studio. A monthly credit for Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform is included with Visual Dev Essentials for projects requiring a bit of help from the cloud.
Earlier this year Xbox chief Phil Spencer expressed a desire to help move the video games industry forward. It appears that a major step was to make game development less expensive and easier for everybody. Today Microsoft made that happen.
