According to the information from their team meetings this release candidate should be very close to release version which is expected later in December.
This version contains large number of bug fixes, also versions of MinGW and Mac OS used were updated. Now Yosemite is used for packaging.
The most interesting thing, to my opinion, is that in this version they consider Qt WebKit module done. Though it will be supported in future, later they will be developing Qt WebEngine. It is a new module appeared just now and based on Chromium.
Many new features for WinRT and Windows Phone platforms were added in version 5.4.
Templates used in Visual Studio for web applications were updated a lot recently.
Imagine we need to create ASP.NET Web Application using .NET Framework 4.5, Visual Studio 2013 with the latest Update 4 (available since November 12, 2014 http://www.visualstudio.com/news/vs2013-update4-rtm-vs#CodeLens).
Here we can add Application Insights feature to your project which should help us to understand what users are doing with our application, how often they launch it, in what environments, etc. For our test application we don't need it by now.
We will select Web Forms now (we will select MVC template next time for our investigation). We don't need unit tests and hosting in the cloud for this project. In Change Authentication window we can change authentication from Individual User Accounts (default) to No Authentication, Organizational Accounts (i.e. Active Directory) or Windows Authentication (Intranet application).
So pressing OK and our template is being generated, actually got a lot of files!
Let's launch our solution and browse through pages.
We have Home, About, Contact, Register, Log in pages though we haven't written a single line of code yet. But what is more important we notice we have clean URLs without .aspx – like in MVC. This is achieved with the help of Microsoft.AspNet.FriendlyUrls library which was described by Scott Hanselman https://aspnetfriendlyurls.codeplex.com/ . Together with this library we have ViewSwitcher control allowing to switch between desktop and mobile views of the page.
Main target of using these techniques is to improve request load time. Code for creating bundles in in Global.asax.cs file. Look at Bundle.config file, there you can add your own files as well.
This edition is free for individual developers even for building commercial applications. It is also free for everybody participating in open source projects.
I've already installed Community Edition for test. Main C++ and C# projects are in place and I am also able to compile and launch my old projects. .NET Frameworks are available from 2.0 to 4.5.1 with possibility to download later frameworks from web.
At the whole, Community Edition seems to be great free replacement to Professional Edition.