Possible to get Visual Studio Professional or Enterprise on the Windows Environment?

Build Environment
1

Hi there,
I’ve been looking to build a commercial product on the Windows Environment but I’ve just noticed that the version of Visual Studio installed there is Visual Studio Community, so as I understand it not permitted for commercial development.
Is it possible to get either Visual Studio Professional or Enterprise on the Windows Environment or are there any plans to support this in the future?
Many thanks
Alan

2

You may find it best to raise this via a support ticket so that it gets routed internally to the correct person.

As I’m just an external helper I can not say what is or what is not possible, but do VS Pro and Enterprise editions not need a license key to deploy or at least run to be valid under the license agreement?

3

Thanks for the reply, I’ll raise a support ticket as you suggest.

Reading the VS Community license (https visualstudio microsoft /license-terms/vs2022-ga-community/) more closely it may be that I don’t have to worry at the moment as, although I run a business, it doesn’t (yet) count as something that Microsoft would define as an enterprise. :stuck_out_tongue:

For running VS Pro or Enterprise you do need a license but I saw on Github Actions that their runners (https github /actions/runner-images/blob/main/images/win/Windows2022-Readme.md) come with VS Enterprise installed so I was thinking that using a cloud CI provider may be a way to use VS Enterprise without having to buy licenses myself. If I obtained a VS Pro license then perhaps I could justify using VS Community on CircleCI to build commercial software but it seems a bit shaky.

Regards

Alan

4

Hi,

We distribute Visual Studio Community pretty much only for usage with debugging when you RDP into a CircleCI machine. When you’re using visual studio tools in a headless usecase such as ours, you’re actually using visual studio build tools which we install via chocolatey here. In any case, there should be almost 0 instances where you are actively developing on Visual Studio on our platform, unless you’re somehow RDP’ing into a session and using it as your work machine.

5

Hi @ryanbourdais,

Thanks for this. This is really useful as I hadn’t fully appreciated the difference between VS build tools and Visual Studio itself, I kind of assumed that they were one and the same. :stuck_out_tongue:

From what I can understand looking at the build tools download and reading through the build tools license, there doesn’t seem to be any kind of license key needed when using the build tools so I’ll work on the assumption that it’s more incumbent on me to obtain a license for VS Pro or Enterprise if I need it.

Regards

Alan