Microsoft is trying to attract developers by open sourcing the full server-side .NET stack and expanding .NET to run on the Linux and Mac OS platforms. The company also released Visual Studio Community 2013, a new free edition of Visual Studio that provides access to the Visual Studio core toolset.

The announcements kicked off Microsoft’s Connect (); event, where the company released Visual Studio 2015 Preview and .NET 2015 Preview.

"With billions of devices in the market today, developers need tools that target many different form factors and platforms," said S. Somasegar, corporate vice president, Developer Division, Microsoft.

Microsoft is providing the full .NET server stack in open source, including ASP.NET, the .NET compiler, the .NET Core Runtime, Framework and Libraries, enabling developers to build with .NET across Windows, Mac or Linux. Through this implementation, Microsoft will work with the open source community, taking contributions for future improvements to .NET and will work through the .NET Foundation.

Available Wednesday, Visual Studio Community 2013 is a free, fully featured edition of Visual Studio including full extensibility. Targeting any platform, from devices and desktop, to Web and cloud services, the community edition provides developers with access to Microsoft’s Visual Studio toolset for all nonenterprise application development.

Built from the ground up with support for iOS, Android and Windows, Visual Studio 2015 Preview allows developers to build applications and services for any device, on any platform.

To further support cross-platform mobile development with .NET, as part of their strategic partnership, Microsoft and Xamarin announced a new streamlined experience for installing Xamarin from Visual Studio, as well as announced the addition of Visual Studio support to its free offering Xamarin Starter Edition -available later in the year. In addition, for Web developers interested in building cloud-powered apps that target mobile devices, Microsoft delivered the final release of Apache Cordova tools.

Microsoft also on Wednesday announced the preview of ASP.NET 5.0, a streamlined framework and runtime optimized for cloud and server workloads. In addition, the new Connected Services Manager in Visual Studio 2015 makes it easier to connect applications to line-of-business API services such as the Office 365 API and SalesForce, among others.

Microsoft also unveiled additional capabilities for Visual Studio Online, its online service for development projects:

Release Management as a service, available in preview, to enable Microsoft's customers to automate and manage application releases without the need to set up or maintain any service infrastructure.

Cloud Deployment Projects, to allow organizations to more easily and reliably provision and configure development, test and production environments in Azure.

Also on Wednesday, Microsoft announced the availability of Visual Studio 2013 Update 4, the fourth fully featured update in the past 12 months, which includes various productivity enhancements and additional capabilities.