Abstract

Microsoft launched Visual Studio 2017 RC on November 16, 2016 and it’s a free trial for all .NET Enthusiasts and developer community. Once a developer downloads the free trial, its only valid for certain period and this article will help you to learn how to check the validity date of VS 2017 RC.

If you have not yet installed the Visual Studio 2017 RC yet, then you might want to read my previous article on Installing Visual Studio 2017 RC

What is the benefit of Free trial?

Release Candidate is a free trail for developers to try the another latest and greatest features of new IDE and tooling around it; and that gives sufficient time to anyone learn and try what’s new in that new shiny tool and when you or your organization is ready to upgrade to a paid licensed version; you can continue to use the greatest and latest.

So when this free trial will end?

Unlike Visual Studio Community edition which is a Free download, Visual Studio 2017 Developer and Enterprise Editions are Free trial.

Free Download

Visual Studio Community is a Free Download and it remains free the whole life time of the application while it’s installed on your machine.

Free Trial

Visual Studio 2017 Professional and Enterprise are NOT FREE but offer Free Trial, which means that Trial will end after certain date and then you will be no longer able to use that product unless you buy or upgrade to a licensed version of that product.

Until when is RC Valid

Well, usually Microsoft Product Teams know well in advance and work towards releasing the product after few months of RC. But to be sure until when your installed Visual Studio 2017 RC is valid, you can follow the steps below.

  1. Launch Visual Studio 2017 RC2.Go to Help menu and click on “About Microsoft Visual Studio”3.From the opened dialog as shown below, click on “License Status”4.Now you will see a dialog as shown below and you can clearly see the final date of the end of Free trial.

Introduction

Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 is the most exciting version of Visual Studio. You can download the RC from https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/visual-studio-2017-rc/

Visual Studio 2017 has a lot of cool features, tool support and best developer experience right from Installation to code to debug to test to deploy (even it’s better if it’s to Azure).

System Requirements

To know minimum requirements for successful installation of Visual Studio 2017 product family, please visit this URL
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/productinfo/vs2017-system-requirements-vs

Installation

Run the downloaded .exe and you will see a very unique launch screen as shown below.

Option Selection

Visual Studio 2017 offers a brand new way of choosing the tool set’s. You can choose one of the following:

  • workloads I.e. what exactly you do or want to do.
  • Individual Components I.e. hand pick all components individually. I feel it could be messy unless you want to cherry pick.
  • Language Packs I.e. select language of your choice.

Workloads

Workloads is the easiest and most effective way of installing all components and dependencies of your chosen field of development. For example, web, desktop, cloud, node, data science etc.

This is so much loaded that you can select up to 8 “Web & Cloud” workloads. As shown in the image below.

Individual Components

This is a tricky one and can cause issues if someone really starts to pick and choose options from here. However, this will be perfect choice when you just want to install “.NET Core Runtime” or so.

Language Packs

This enables you to pick language of your choice. Based on your operating System, it will automatically default to a language; as shown in the image below.

Making Selection

Once selection is made; preferably from Workloads tab; you will see that Summary section is populated with all the components which will be installed. If you want you can expand the each listed item under summary and see all the components installed under each item to a very granular level.

Now, Let’s Begin the Installation

I personally feel that this is one of the fastest Visual Studio setup since 1st version I had my hands on back in 1996

 

 

Setup Complete

Visual Studio 2017 RC setup requires you to Restart your PC. You may not want to do that; but I recommend to “Restart” it.

Welcome Visual Studio 2017

Notice the Recently added section and see all the Visual Studio 2017 components.

Check the Installed .NET Frameworks

Below image shows that all the .NET Frameworks are successfully installed. Which includes .NET Framework until 4.6.x and .NET 1.0 Preview 3. You can run commands as shown below to check those in any machine.

“dotnet –version” is a very handy command to be executed from Developer Command Prompt to identify if you have .NET Core or not.

Visual Studio Installer

In the installed items, there is an item listed at the very end “Visual Studio Installer” this is to Modify, Repair, Uninstall etc.

Let’s Fire-up Visual Studio 2017

Here comes the Most Awaited IDE