.NET itself has always been "free" (as in beer), it's just VS they made people pay for. They've had a community edition since VS2012 at least, possibly earlier

.NET itself has always been "free" (as in beer), it's just VS they made people pay for. They've had a community edition since VS2012 at least, possibly earlier but that's as far back as my brain goes. The Community edition is pretty full-featured, it's only missing some TFS integration stuff, some test suite stuff and advanced profiling. I'd compare it to IntelliJ's free/pro model.