Microsoft Offering Free Windows 10 Development Environment VM for a Limited Time (bleepingcomputer.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is providing a free virtual machine that comes preloaded with Windows 10 Enterprise, Visual Studio 2017, and various utilities in order to promote the development of Universal Windows Platform apps. Before you get too excited about a free version of Windows 10 Enterprise, this Virtual Machine will expire on January 15th 2018. When downloading the development environment, you can choose either a VMware, VirtualBox, Hyper-V, or Parallels virtual machine depending on what virtual machine software you use. Each of these images are about 17-20GB when extracted from the downloaded archive and include almost everything you need to develop Universal Windows Platform apps.

Comments

Windows 10 runs unactivated just fine

[caseih]

I've been doing some test development on a Windows 10 VM for a long time now. I downloaded the VM image from Microsoft even. But I never bothered to activate it but it runs fine and gets updates. I can't change colors and backgrounds without using regedit, but for test purposes, it works just fine. Even gets updates. So if you can live with a little nag watermark, this is an option when this special free development VM expires. In fact when it does expire, just let it go into unactivated mode.

not that big of an offering

[jarkus4]

Microsoft used to offer VMs of every Windows version that was in active support under the banner of IE compatibility testing. Only difference with this new offering is that they preload this image with whole dev environment instead of just a system.

Current location for images I have mentioned:
https://developer.microsoft.co...
Old one including WinXP (haven't tested if it still really works):
https://www.microsoft.com/en-u...