Visual Studio 2015 is a Microsoft product integrating developer productivity tools, cloud services, and extensions to create great apps and games for the web, Windows Store, the desktop, for Android and iOS.

The main changes from the previous version in 2013 are:

• product setup, now componentized
• sign in across multiple Visual Studio accounts through the new “Account Manager”
• cross-platform mobile device development support (in C# with Xamarin or Unity, in HTML/Javascript with Apache Cordova), the introduction of ASP.NET 5 for the web, new .NET Framework v4.6 (150 new APIs and 50 other updates)
• “Device preview” menu bar,  to see how your XAML-based UI will render
• graphics diagnostics, with DirectX 12 apps debug support
• the wizard to add connected services like Azure, Office 365 and Salesforce
• significant improvements in UI design with Blend
• cross-platform debugging support with Visual Studio Emulator for Android, Visual Studio Tools for Apache Cordova and Xamarin
• new Roslyn compiler for C# and Visual Basic with faster compile times and live code analysis
• IDE improvements (high resolution images, touch support, custom layouts, CodeLens in the Professional and Enterprise versions, design and modeling tools in the Enterprise version).

As usual, there are several versions of Visual Studio 2015, for some of which you obviously need to buy a license, to obtain a serial number for activation (otherwise you’ll get a 30 days free trial period).

All editions, in their full version, can be freely downloaded from Microsoft website at the following links:

Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition

Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 Professional Edition

Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 Enterprise Edition

For a comparison of the different editions you can refer to this link:

https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/compare-visual-studio-2015-products-vs

Other interesting downloads are:

Microsoft .NET Framework v4.6 (English only)

Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 Test Professional

Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 Modeling SDK (English only)

The interesting thing about these links (except those marked with “English only”) is that you can just change the last three digits to download products for other languages, according to the codes listed on this page:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/hh361638(v=office.14).aspx

Some examples:

407: Deutsch
409: English
40c: French
410: Italian
416: Portuguese

Well, what else to add at this point? Happy coding!