Only for some students. If you don't have an .edu address and your college or university is not in their pre-approved list, it's difficult to get a free license. It's a pretty typical attitude towards us coming from third-world countries though, and we developed our own ways of dealing with this.
And please stop this fake reality bullshit. NOBODY, not a single freaking person who wants to learn a new language will start off by searching the internet for an IDE and debugger where they can apply for a free license and then wait a few days so they can try it out. That is just ridiculous to even suggest.
If one wants to learn a language they download the SDK, open VS Code and look for an extension. If there is none or the one that exists doesn't work they basically say "WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT", close it and walk away with the conclusion that it's not well supported. Let's stay real please okay.
Then you should say: "a person who just starts with .Net".
> And please stop this fake reality bullshit. NOBODY, not a single freaking person who wants to learn a new language will start off by searching the internet for an IDE and debugger
I started with .net only 4 years ago. I went ahead and got myself Rider because I dislike VS Code and I already had 6 years experience with other JetBrains IDEs.
Oh look. I'm that "no single person" who went ahead and looked for an IDE. And bought it
> Let's stay real please okay.
Screaming nonsense at the top of your lungs doesn't make you any closer to reality.
> And please stop this fake reality [...]. NOBODY, not a single freaking person who wants to learn a new language will start off by searching the internet for an IDE and debugger where they can apply for a free license and then wait a few days so they can try it out. That is just ridiculous to even suggest.
I actually did. JetBrains products were really nice to try out whilst studying in university and eventually lead to me purchasing the ultimate tools package for any personal or professional projects that I might want to do.
It's really amazing to have the same set of tools for almost all of the languages that you might want to work with, that work consistently across all of the OSes that you might use. Normally I avoid paid software because of the vendor lock in, but a lot of the time it feels like JetBrains are just the company that you should reach for to avoid headaches, for better or worse.
For comparison, in the Java ecosystem, you also have Eclipse which has performance problems and an odd/unstable plugin ecosystem (though some swear by it) and NetBeans which has been handed over to Apache but doesn't really get much love or attention towards its development at all. Of course, some might use Visual Studio Code or another text editor with plugins but not being able to do refactoring across a project with 4000+ source files makes that approach dead on arrival for me, for all but the smallest projects.
The situation is pretty similar in regards to C#: you have Visual Studio which limits the platforms, JetBrains Rider which is a paid project, Visual Studio Code plugins which are insufficient and also something like MonoDevelop, which has pretty much been abandoned.
As all JetBrains products, it's free for students, open source projects, and classroom assistance, and training courses. https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/buy/#discounts
And it includes an excellent debugger.