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Visual Studio 2015 Pricing To Be Simplified

Current Ultimate subscribers will notice a significant price reduction. Also: a Visual Studio 2015 timeline quick reference.

We're pretty sure there's no joke here: Microsoft has released pricing for the upcoming Visual Studio 2015, and it's being simplified a bit.

Rather than the four versions that are available currently -- Community, Professional with MSDN, Premium with MSDN, and Ultimate with MSDN -- the company will consolidate "Visual Studio Premium and Visual Studio Ultimate into one single offering called Visual Studio Enterprise with MSDN," said Mitra Azizirad, through a blog post.

Microsoft lists retail pricing for each edition at the following upon release: Community, free; Professional with MSDN, $1,199; Enterprise with MSDN, $5,999. Current Ultimate subscribers will be automatically upgraded to the new Enterprise edition when it's released. Because of that, Azizirad notes that Ultimate subscribers will see a significant savings -- it currently retails for $13,299.

Get complete pricing details, features and an upgrade matrix.

As a side note, the Visual Studio team has blogged its timeline for features being developed in the upcoming suite. The timeline doesn't offer any specific dates or a daily update on where the features stand in the development process, but it consolidates in one place links to relevant blog posts on those features from the various teams working on them. Clicking on C# 6, for example, goes to a blog post from Nov. 20, 2014, that details the C# team's post on new features at that time.

About the Author

You Tell 'Em, Readers: If you've read this far, know that Michael Domingo, Visual Studio Magazine Editor in Chief, is here to serve you, dear readers, and wants to get you the information you so richly deserve. What news, content, topics, issues do you want to see covered in Visual Studio Magazine? He's listening at [email protected].

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