Kerkia

Background

A development environment or IDE (integrated Development Environment) is a tool that application designers and programmers use in order to build software applications.

Recommendation

There are two tools that are really good for this purpose. The one we recommend, mostly because it is complete and largely adopted by the community, is the family of Visual Studio Express products, including Visual C# and Visual Web Developer which we use at Kerkia. Note that the screenshot below is a teaser that relates tot he 2010 version, not released yet at the time we write this post. Also a note for beginners: Microsoft offers many videos that help leaning these products and which we strongly recommend.

The other alternative is SharpDevelop, an open source IDE specialized for C#. While not as strong for web development as the Visual Studio family, this IDE is nevertheless an excellent alternative.

Web links

Visual Studio Express

Web site: http://www.microsoft.com/exPress/

Download: http://www.microsoft.com/express/download/

SharpDevelop

Web site: http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/

Download: http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/Download/