There are different versions of Visual Studio 2015 available to satisfy the various needs of developers/organizations. Primarily, there are four versions of Visual Studio 2015:
- Visual Studio Community
- Visual Studio Professional
- Visual Studio Enterprise
- Visual Studio Test Professional
Visual Studio can be installed on computers running Windows 7 Service Pack 1 operating system and above. You can get to know the complete list of requirements from the following URL:
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/downloads/visual-studio-2015-system-requirements-vs.aspx
This is a fully featured IDE available for building desktops, web applications, and cloud services. It is available free of cost for individual users.
You can download Visual Studio Community from the following URL:
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-community-vs.aspx
Throughout this book, we will be using the Visual Studio Community version for development as it is available free of cost to individual developers.
As the name implies, Visual Studio Professional is targeted at professional developers and contains features such as Code Lens for improving your team's productivity. It also has features for greater collaboration within the team.
Visual Studio Enterprise is the full-blown version of Visual Studio with a complete set of features for collaboration, including a team foundation server, modeling, and testing.
Visual Studio Test Professional is primarily aimed for the testing team or people who are involved in the testing, which might include developers. In any software development methodology, either the waterfall model or agile developers need to execute the development suite test cases for the code they are developing.