Microsoft has announced its Visual Studio and .NET development tools will be available for Linux and Mac OS as the firm continues to push ahead with its cross-platform strategy.
S. Somasegar, corporate vice president of the developer division at Microsoft said Visual Studio 2013 will be available for free in its new form as Visual Studio Community 2013. The update to Visual Studio version 4 has also been released and is available as a free upgrade for existing users.
"Visual Studio and .NET have been two bedrocks of the Microsoft developer ecosystem for over a decade," he said.
"With over 1.8 billion installations of .NET and over 7 million downloads of Visual Studio 2013 in just the last year, Visual Studio and .NET are enabling millions of developers to build some of today's most important software and services powering businesses, apps and sites."
Microsoft also announced Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 2015 previews for existing developers, bringing the ability for more cloud-based development and 'productivity improvements' such as added support for iOS, Android and Windows, with developers able to use HTML, JavaScript, C# or C++ to produce apps.
"With these releases, we are broadly opening up access to our industry leading platform and tools to every developer building any application in today's mobile-first, cloud-first world," Somasegar continued.
"No matter if you are a startup, a student, a hobbyist, an open source developer or a commercial developer, and no matter the platform you are targeting or the app you are creating, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Online, .NET and Azure will help you be successful."
