Visual Studio .NET Hosting : Compare Hosting

While you can still download and install Visual Studio on your own computer, just like you used to in the old days, a hosted solution provides a number of additional benefits, including flexibility to program from anywhere, additional collaboration features, increased system resources, and much more. Of course, if you run Visual Studio on your own hosted server, make sure to do your research to find a hosting platform that will provide the best performance. There are also Azure-based hosting plans available, which are optimized for Visual Studio hosting.

Visual Studio allows you to code in most popular languages, including C#, C++, Java, Python, Visual Basic, and more.

Yes. Visual Studio web apps can be deployed on any web server, regardless of platform. Or you can host your application directly to the cloud with Microsoft Azure. Regardless of your hosting choice, you can publish and maintain your website through Visual Studio.

XML Web Services allow different applications from different sources to communicate, using standardized protocols. By passing standardized XML, web services share data and processes across a network, allowing users to interface with the original source without needing a custom GUI or additional programming.

Yes. Visual Studio was designed to create applications for desktop, web, mobile, and cloud environments. What’s more, you can utilize the same code to create separate apps for each.

Yes. Being a Microsoft product, the primary focus for Visual Studio is, of course, Windows devices. However, you can create for other devices either by developing web-based applications or by taking advantage of Visual Studio’s global partner ecosystem, which allows you to utilize cross-platform programs, such as Xamarin, to compile your source code for multiple devices, including iOS, Android, and Mac.

Visual Studio is integrated with a number of other Microsoft services. Visual Studio can be purchased and used with MSDN. You can subscribe to Visual Studio services through Azure, and host your website using Azure. It is optimized for developing applications to run on Windows desktops, the Windows Store, and Windows Phone. It can also be used to create custom business applications that integrate with Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Office.

Visual Studio provides a number of features for development teams, including version control, unlimited Git or TFVC repos, the ability to program for multiple platforms using the same code, workflow management, code review processes, automated build processes for continuous integration, change tracking, and group management to set access rights and permission for your various development teams.

Aside from being a powerful programming environment capable of handling many programming languages, Visual Studio offers a number of conveniences for programmers. The IntelliSense feature auto-completes code for you, increasing speed and accuracy. Like MS Word detecting potential grammar mistakes, Visual Studio adds squiggly lines under code that may cause issues. There are a number of built-in navigation features to make it easier to find your way around large code. Code Lens allows you to quickly view a code’s call structure, navigate to related functions, and see whether its tests are passing, without leaving your code. You can adjust your layout, view a complete list of errors, and much more.

Visual Studio provides a number of tools to monitor performance, analytics, and usage for your websites and apps. You can set up customizable dashboards to track performance, usage, and any crashes. You can establish tests and thresholds, and set up alerts to be notified if something isn’t performing to standards. Response times, request logs, and more are available to diagnose performance problems. And you can create custom analytics to determine things such as where users come from and what parts of your app are most popular, so you can continuously optimize and improve.

Visual Studio Community is a free version of Visual Studio. It is identical to Visual Studio professional in terms of features and capabilities. However, it has a much more limited license. Individual developers can use Visual Studio Community for free to develop apps. Organizations can use Visual Studio Communities for an unlimited number of users, so long as it’s being used in a classroom, for academic research, or to contribute to open source projects. And non-enterprise organizations (with less than 250 PCs or less than $1M in annual revenue) can use Communities for up to 5 users.

Yes. In late 2014, Microsoft open sourced the full server-side .NET stack. This includes ASP.NET, the .NET compiler, and the .NET Core Runtime, Framework, and Libraries. The move to open source was meant to promote the development of .NET application across Windows, Mac, and Linux.