Visual Studio Pro is one of the most popular IDEs you can use, but subscriptions are expensive. If you want a cheaper alternative that still gives you the most recent upgrades, you can actually get Visual Studio Pro 2026 on sale now for $49.99 (reg. $499.99).
Visual Studio Pro is a 64-bit development environment for building modern apps on Windows. You can create cross-platform mobile and desktop apps with .NET MAUI, web interfaces in C# with Blazor, and .NET or C++ software that targets Windows, Linux, or containers. Hot reload support lets you apply many code changes to running apps, which can shorten test and debug cycles.
AI-assisted tools like Intellicode look at your existing code and suggest likely completions for lines and blocks, which cuts down on repetitive typing and can reduce simple errors. Codelens overlays information about authors, commits, test status, and references directly in the editor so you can see activity around a file without switching views.
For teams, Live Share allows real-time editing and debugging sessions where collaborators join your environment without cloning the repository or installing every dependency. Access controls and session settings help you keep
