Clearly I’ve not been keeping up – when exactly did the full featured version become free for personal and open source use? Is there any reason I shouldn’t just install the latest 2015 version and get rid of my (only slightly dodgy) 2008 VS Pro?

Is there any difference between the free Community version and the one you have to pay for apart from the licensing? Last time I looked the free version was the stripped down Express which amongst other things didn’t come with MFC (yes I know that’s archaic and I doubt I’ll use it, but I was using it a lot back then).

…and Android and iOS dev in C++

It became free as part of the 2015 release (or shortly after cant remember the exact details).
Definitely worth switching to 2015 from 2008.
In terms of differences there are a few such as code lens but its not like the express edition in terms of crippling differences. Just stuff which can make team work, in particular, more efficient but wont stop you working.

Yeah, definitely worth switching to VS2015.

Microsoft have just bought Xamarin as well, which means iOS / Android dev in C# which is so easy it’s almost cheating.

recent versions have been a visual eyesore, no wonder they are giving it away. 🙁 Real pain having to use every version since 2008!

Well I’m used to that, as it’s used as a platform for development for the microcontrollers I use – hence it’s already strangely familiar. I thought I was going to keep 2008 for a while, but I ported a couple of my projects across and they just compiled and ran with touching anything (I’m kind of disappointed that upgrading to a newer .NET didn’t bring any obvious benefits though 🙁 ) so I think it might be getting uninstalled today.

There appears no obvious reason to use anything else for Windows dev now – I wonder if the open source project I’ve contributed to which is built with QT and MinGW will get ported (I so hate having multiple different dev platforms – also Eclipse and Android Studio here – unfortunately whilst I’d choose to use C# to build Android apps given that’s now possible, I want to work with existing apps).

he he – still on VS 2008 here!! partly as updating would mean updating the other remote team members, re-integrate with TFS and so on. But eventually yes I imagine I/we will do so.

Wonder how long I need to run my MSDN sub for then ? 🙂