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I know that this might sound like an attack, but it's not. I'm just asking out of curiosity: If you want to code in Java, there are highly sophisticated IDEs you can download and code in for free (eg - eclipse). The same for Mac (Xcode).

When MS bought out .NET - was there any particular IDE or language development environment that was distributed for free to encourage (especially young) developers to code in it? Or did you always have to pay for Visual Studio?

I'm not slagging off MS. I'm actually genuinely interested in getting my hands dirty with some Visual C# now that Windows 7 is shaping up to be quite a nice OS to use. It just seems odd that I have to pay someone so that I can write stuff for their OS.




What you want is Visual Studio Express. Or more precisely Visual C# 2010 Express. http://www.microsoft.com/express/downloads/


Or Monodevelop, or SharpDevelop.

Or just your favourite text editor coupled to the build system that comes with the .NET framework.

You could even write an Emacs mode for this.


> It just seems odd that I have to pay someone so that I can write stuff for their OS.

Unless you develop on something non-Windows, you are already paying Microsoft in order write stuff for their OS.

And that's their evil plan. It's sheer elegance in its simplicity ;-)




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