Introduction
In today’s article we will look at the Visual Studio Subscription (previously MSDN subscription) which is for all developers and provides some very great development, analysis, learning and support tools and above all, these are all for free. Previously, we had seen MSDN professional, enterprise etc. subscriptions which cost very much and although provided through employers were hard to purchase for developers, especially people just starting out in the Microsoft development world. This new free subscription is called Visual Studio Dev Essentials.
Signing up for the VS Dev Essentials Subscription
The first step is to visit the below URL
https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/dev-essentials/
Here, you simply click on Join or access now.
Next, you would need to provide your Microsoft ID. I use my Hotmail account for this, but you can use any Microsoft account you have or signup for a new one. Once you have logged in, you will see the below screen with all the benefits available to you. Please note that these benefits are always changing and hence you might see some new benefits as well as some might not be available anymore.
The featured benefit is the free development environment of Visual Studio Community edition. This is a full IDE for your software development and for all articles I have written, I have used the Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition. Below this you see the 6-month subscription to Syncfusion Xamarin controls. This provides a library of controls to be used in your Xamarin apps. In addition to this the Community edition for Visual Studio for Mac is also available.
Further down we see the below benefits,
I have not worked with all the above benefits but will cover all the ones I have used or have knowledge about.
Azure DevOps provides free Git repos for your storage and hosted builds to get started with CI/CD concepts. The Azure free account gives you access to use the Azure environment for a $200 credit where you can try all services on Azure to a maximum of $200. After that there are numerous services available for 12 months. You can build Virtual machines, App Services, Mobile Services, Databases etc. and experiment with your Azure Solutions in a sandbox environment.
Next, is the great Visual Studio Code platform which can be used for development across platforms and although I am a big fan of Visual Studio on Windows, you can use this IDE as it is a very lightweight platform and has lots of extensions which make it easy to use.
The Azure App Service benefit can be used to quickly build web and mobile apps for any platform. The Syncfusion Essential JS 2 provides a 6-month subscription to get and try the latest JavaScript UI controls. These are extremely useful to use with the Angular and React JavaScript frameworks. Application Insights is an Azure service which adds instrumentation to your web app to look through the health and performance of your application.
And then there is Office Online for working on Office files in collaboration with others.
And then comes the cool learning and support tools. Free learning is available on the Pluralsight, DataCamp and LinkedIn Learning sites. The LinkedIn Learning is a one-month Premium subscription. You can take various courses on these sites and continue subscription after the free trial if you find these courses to be helpful. Of course, you would need to pay according to the subscription you want to buy after the free trial is over. I have found some particularly useful courses on all these sites. On LinkedIn Learning, there are courses which range from 15-20 minutes to hours and you can cover these according to your time and schedule. There is also a Code magazine and you can
subscribe to the 1-year digital copy. This will keep you up to date on latest information in the field on IT.
Then finally, we have the support forums where you can post questions and get guidance from experts in the Azure and general Developer Community.
Summary
In this article, we looked at the free Microsoft Visual Studio Dev Essentials subscription and what are the benefits offered by this subscription. I would recommend all developers to sign up for this subscription if you do not have the paid professional or enterprise subscriptions. These will provide lots of tools, support and training options for you and help you to move forward in the field of development with Microsoft tools.