At the Connect() developer event last week in New York, Microsoft launched Visual Studio Community 2013, the free version of the IDE for small teams. To allow our developers to take advantage of the new version, the Murl Engine will start providing support for Visual Studio 2013 beginning with the next upcoming release.

Community Edition

Visual Studio Community 2013 is a new, free and fully featured edition of Visual Studio including full extensibility. Similar to the Express version of Visual Studio, the Community edition is free and can be used to create free or paid apps. Though, the Community edition is restricted to individual developers and small organizations (max five users). Microsoft's definition of a small organization in this regard is a company up to 250 PC's and less than $ 1 Million annual revenue (see also visual-studio-community#QnA). Nevertheless the Community edition is a great offer specifically for Indie developers.

Visual Studio 2013 Support

Therefore all future releases of the Murl Engine will provide support for VS2013 and will come with the required prebuild libraries. Of course, not only the Community edition is supported. Developers may also use Visual Studio Express 2013, Visual Studio Professional 2013 or any other Visual Studio version supporting the 2013 Toolset (ToolsVersion 12.0).

Upgrade Projects to VS2013

The new Dashboard command Project / Create Missing Project Files can be used to add VS2013 project files to an existing project.

Alternatively you can manually copy your VS2010 project files to an folder named VS2013 and use Visual Studio 2013 to upgrade the project files:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 12.0\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" mySolution.sln /upgrade

Visual Studio 2008 Support Discontinued

By introducing support for Visual Studio 2013 we will stop delivering prebuild libraries for Visual Studio 2008. The Murl Engine will still support VS2008 but we will just not include the prebuild libraries into the download package. If you really need to support Windows 2000 or Windows XP pre SP2, we will provide you the libraries separately. Just drop us an e-mail or use the forum.