At Build this week Microsoft did its best to woo developers of all kinds, offering cross-platform tools and software upgrades to improve productivity, and above all clarifying its vision for universal apps.

The company’s underlying goal is to get as many developers as possible to use its tools and build Microsoft applications for Windows and other platforms. To see whether Microsoft is on the right track, developers should be looking at the following software:

Visual Studio 2015 release candidate

Step-by-step, Microsoft is getting closer to the launch of Visual Studio 2015, which was at the center of many of the announcements at Build. On Wednesday, the Visual Studio 2015 release candidate was made available for download, with a go-live license for taking it into production.

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