Visual Studio Express was supplanted by the Visual Studio Community edition, which is also available for free, but with a different license. Compared to Visual Studio Express, the new license is more friendly to open-source but less for some closed source developers. The community edition works with plugins, a feature that was previously exclusive to the paid editions (Professional and higher). All Express editions of Visual Studio 2015 are, however, still available for the time being alongside Express 2017 for Windows Desktop. Microsoft's recommended alternative is Visual Studio Community 2019.