Microsoft Visual Studio is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) tool used by developers worldwide to develop, compile, and execute their .NET Framework applications. There are several features provided in the tool that help developers not only improve the quality of the application developed, but also greatly reduce the time of development. 

Some of the key features of Visual Studio are mentioned here:

• It uses Microsoft software development platforms such as Windows API, Forms, WPF, and Silverlight.
• While writing code, it provides IntelliSense code-completion features, which help the developers write code efficiently.
• It also provides a forms designer for building GUI applications, a class designer, and database schema designer.
• It provides support for different source control systems, such as GitHub and TFS.

The current version of Visual Studio is 2017. For development purposes, Microsoft provides a Community Edition of Visual Studio, which is free of cost and can be used for non-commercial activities. 

It's essential that before using the Community Edition, we go through the terms and conditions of use as well: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/license-terms/mlt553321/.

In the next section, we will do a walk-through on the basic syntax involved in writing a basic C# application.