Visual Studio Community 2015 with Update 3 officially supports the following operating systems:

Microsoft no longer features the 2015 edition on its primary landing page, but they still host the official, untouched installers through their legacy portal:

When Microsoft released Visual Studio 2015 on July 20, 2015, it marked a pivotal moment in the company's history. For the first time, a fully-featured, extensible, and previously "Professional" tier IDE was made legally free for individual developers, open-source contributors, and small teams via the new .

After this date, there will be for Visual Studio 2015, its runtimes (MSVC v140), or its components. It is strongly advised for mission-critical systems to start planning a migration to a supported version like Visual Studio 2022 to maintain a secure development environment.

Open the downloaded file (e.g., vs_community.exe or mount the .iso ).

The trial license will automatically convert into a permanent, free Community license. Common Troubleshooting Tips

Select "Default" for a standard installation, or "Custom" if you want to select specific programming languages (C++, C#) or tools (Windows Phone tools, Xamarin).

Compared to modern IDEs, VS 2015 can run more efficiently on older hardware.

Perfect for maintaining older enterprise applications, legacy C++ codebases, or early .NET Framework (versions 4.5 to 4.6) apps.

Download Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition: A Complete Guide

One of the biggest questions when VS2015 launched was which edition to choose. Here is a high-level breakdown of the pricing and value, to illustrate what you are getting for free with Community:

Note: You may need to sign in with a Microsoft account to access legacy downloads. Direct Installer Links

Features like "Light Bulbs" (for quick actions and refactoring) and "CodeLens" (which shows code references and changes) became standard in this version, drastically increasing coding speed. System Requirements