I can see how you may have missed Visual Studio Community Edition[0] in the recent flood of awesome MS announcements but it's been around for a while. Comments on the extension page suggest it works for this.
I can see how people missed the Community Edition, I cannot see how people don't know that the Express Edition has been free since literally 2005[0]. The only real difference between the free express editions and the community edition is the ability to install Visual Studio extensions, but broadly speaking it isn't that big of a change from Express 2013 for Windows Desktop.
If people don't know that Visual Studio has had a free version for 10 years(!) then they have their head in the sand. But it seems a lot of these people are common, often making bad jokes about IE "sucking" (hint: it doesn't, even pre-Edge), Windows being insecure (hint: it isn't post-XP), and Microsoft being a monopoly (Microsoft's market influence is nothing like what it was in the 1990s, between OS X, iOS, and Android it has a lot of legitimate competition).
[0] https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/products/visual-studio-co...