What is new about Visual Studio 19 Community download access ?

Question

Recently I was going to have someone download Visual Studio 2019 community. When I go to the download page I found we no longer have access to that download. It says "not available" on the Visual Studio 19 download page. What is the reason for this.

Answer 1

If you read the fine print for Community, which is a free tool, then it states that the free version of Visual Studio is always the latest version, 2022 in this case. Microsoft does not directly allow you to download older versions of the free Community edition. To use an older version of VS you have to have a subscription, in which case using Community at all makes no sense since you'll have a license for Professional or higher.

There are a couple workarounds:

1. If you intend to use Community edition and need to "lock" it at a particular VS version then download the offline installer and ensure you download everything while it is still available. For VS 2019 it is too late.
2. Get VS from an alternative download site. If you search this forum for a post made earlier this week then someone asked the same question and a link was provided to the internet archives where the download link was still available. Be aware though that downloading software from unofficial sources is always a risk so proceed with caution.
3. Just use the latest version. There shouldn't be any differences between VS 2019 and VS 2022 for Community that would impact your projects. You can load up and work with solutions in either version interchangeably. Since they are free then licensing isn't an issue either.