MSFT pitched our team on paying us to make Windows mobile apps and since we only did iOS/Android/web on Mac it would have required us buying new Windows systems for most of the team. My recollection from doing Windows development in 2000's was having to pay thousands of dollars per year for the MSDN/VC++. This is in addition to looking at the Windows phone market realistically and thinking - these apps for hire for Microsoft are going to be the only apps we would ever make for Windows mobile. We would definitely have done it if we had Windows developer systems ready to go.
You don't have to pay anything to develop on Windows. Visual Studio Community Edition is free. Even if you want the professional edition - I don't see any reason you would - it's $499 per seat.
You also wouldn't have to buy Windows computers - you could either buy Windows + Parallels
or spend about $60 a month and get a hosted Windows desktop on AWS.
You can get a hosted build server via Visual Studio Online - unlimited private git repos, 5 users free (each additional user $5). 240 build minutes free per month or $40 per hosted build agent with unlimited minutes.
If you really have no need for Windows machines, just use AWS Workspaces and you can get a 4 vcpu 16GB Hosted Windows workstation for $70 a month.
You're not allowed to use Visual Studio Community Edition to develop commercial programs.
> An unlimited number of users within an organization can use Visual Studio Community for the following scenarios: in a classroom learning environment, for academic research, or for contributing to open source projects.
For all other usage scenarios:
In non-enterprise organizations, up to five users can use Visual Studio Community. In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or >$1 Million US Dollars in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.
In today's world -i.e. not for Windows Phone - I would probably not even bother with VS 2017 Professional for a two or three month project. I would just use JetBrains Rider (Macs/Windows/Linux) for $35 a month and use .Net Core and develop on the Mac.
If you really don't want to spend any money today, you could use Visual Studio Code on Macs, Windows, Linux.
Your summary does not accurately reflect what the license states.
You can use Visual Studio Community Edition for commercial programs, so long as:
* You're not doing so for an organization that has more than 250 PCs or 1 million USD in annual revenue
* No more then 5 users in the organization that you are using it for are using it for things other than open source, academic research, and classroom learning
