March 22, 2016 at 10:28

Free Developer Feature Pack: Visual Studio Dev Essentials



    Hello!

    Free development tools from Microsoft, contrary to popular belief, include not only the powerful and powerful IDE Visual Studio 2015 Community , but also a number of other useful components and products. For example, Visual Studio Team Services has its own free offer for teams of no more than 5 people. These and many other offers are now available to every developer using Visual Studio Dev Essentials.

    New Visual Studio Dev EssentialsAnnounced in November 2015, it provides centralized access to the main free components for the developer on Visual Studio, and also offers various tools to provide a complete software development cycle, including tools and products of third-party companies, such as Parallels, Xamarin, etc.

    The Dev Essentials program also provides access to training materials such as Pluralsight, Xamarin University, etc. for several months. As well as the opportunity to receive priority support in the forums.

    Component Overview


    To access the program, you must have a Microsoft account (formerly Live ID). You can register it here .

    After entering the Visual Studio Dev Essentials portal , at the very beginning of the page, you can record the offers that interest you most. By default, Visual Studio family tools are offered here, free offers of the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, etc.

    Let's briefly go through each of the program components.

    In addition to Visual Studio 2015 Community and Visual Studio Team Services , here on the program portal, you can download Visual Studio CodeIs a cross-platform code editor available for Windows, OS X and Linux operating systems. Supports more than 40 languages, debugging Mono and Node.js, as well as many other additional features. Including functional expansion using components from the Visual Studio Marketplace .

    The developer version of the Microsoft R Server component available in the offer will allow you to create powerful analytics solutions in the R language on Windows, Hadoop, Terradata, and Linux.

    The trial period of the Microsoft Azure cloud platform is one month, and the offer for Dev Essentials participants guarantees a monthly provision of $ 25 per year for using any services presented on the portal. Azure App Service- The service available in Azure subscription includes work with web applications, mobile backend, etc. and provides part of the functionality for free.

    The exclusive Pluralsight offer for Dev Essentials members includes a 6-month access to training courses from a global platform providing online learning on various technologies. Another suggestion for those who want to gain more knowledge and skills is Xamarin University Mobile Testing - training video courses and instructions for developing iOS and Android applications in C # from Xamarin experts.

    Instruments




    Application Insights is a cross-platform component of the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, which allows the developer to receive relevant information about the viability and performance of the developed services and applications for free.

    The Hockey App will be useful to mobile developers as the main service from Microsoft to receive timely information about the behavior of mobile and desktop applications during their beta testing, distribution of test builds of the application, collection of crash reports and feedback.

    For those who want to get acquainted with the development for the universal platform of Windows 10 (UWP), the Dev Essentials program contains the ready-made environment necessary for the development of UWP applications in the format of a familiarization virtual machinefor Hyper-V, VMWare, VirtualBox, Parallels.

    Mac users can develop a 3-month subscription for Parallels Desktop for Mac Pro and a similar offer for Parallels Access to develop and test applications for any platform on their computer right on the Dev Essentials personal portal page .

    Power BI is useful for developers to conveniently and clearly present data in any convenient place and on any type of device.

    The following proposal by Dev Essentials reminds that you can create, edit and work together with the team on project documents right in your browser, using the capabilities of the new Office Onlinewithout installing software on your computer, and at the same time completely free. And save them, for example, by placing them in the OneDrive cloud storage.

    Training




    Visual Studio Dev Essentials contains many different offers for developers who want to go through to learn more about technology and go through various tutorials.

    For example, a 3-month subscription to courses from WintellectNOW experts , including Microsoft developers , is available for program participants . Our favorite educational platform Microsoft Virtual Academy , containing a huge number of training courses from Microsoft experts and partners, is also presented on the portal.

    To keep abreast of the latest Microsoft technology news, you can also access MSDN Magazine and subscribe to the MSDN Flash newsletter..

    Support




    As a member of Visual Studio Dev Essentials, the developer will be given priority support in selected Microsoft forums. This advantage means that a Microsoft engineer will answer the question within 2 business days if, after the publication of the post, the community did not manage to find an answer to this question. Another $ 25 program is available for using the HackHands virtual mentoring service .

    Conclusion


    Visual Studio Dev Essentials - the main components of the developer Visual Studio is a completely new initiative and program of Microsoft, which is currently running in the preliminary version. The program is still continuing to develop in order to provide developers with a maximum of useful and free offers of various services, tools and training materials.

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