​Microsoft has just released new Windows 10 virtual machines that are available right now on the Windows Dev Center either with an evaluation license or as licensed products.

The evaluation version of these virtual machines can be used until April 8, 2017, and include Windows 10 Enterprise version 1607, Visual Studio 2015 Community Update 3, Windows developer SDK and tools, Microsoft Azure SD for .Net, Windows Bridge for iOS and samples, as well as Bash on Ubuntu on Windows.

On the other hand, the licensed virtual machines come with Windows 10 Pro version 1607 (Anniversary Update), but you obviously need a license to use them. For everyone else, the evaluation version is just fine because it comes with the same tools without the need for a license. Nevertheless, they expire after a while.

The virtual machines are available in Hyper-V, Parallels, VirtualBox and VMWare versions, and are obviously shipped in very large packages since they contain all of the above. The VMWare enterprise evaluation version, for example, has 21.7 GB in size.

“Start coding sooner with a virtual machine prepped for Windows 10 development. It has the latest versions of Windows, the developer tools, SDKs, and samples ready to go,” Microsoft explains on the Dev Center.

The purpose here is to empower developers with the necessary tools to build Universal Windows Platform apps easily, so hopefully more of them would download these virtual machines to create apps.