Most of us that work in the IT industry have been around for a long time. We started out in our parents basement writing code in some BASIC environment, ussually Commodore BASIC or QBASIC. Do you remember how thrilling it was? Your first program and it was something extremely basic but the point was it worked. Some of us got hooked right away and kept trying to solve problems and added more and more pushing the capabilities of whatever language we used. As we got older the environments progressed and the programming tools progressed and got more complicated.
For those of us that had access to what was to become the internet we learned about more programming tools and languages through some electronic bulletin board somewhere. This is what is called hobbyist programming. Most of these freeware and shareware programmers are hobbyists they code at night but have a day job somewhere else. One of the guys that I know that does shareware is a woodworker by day, he makes cabinets and bed frames and he comes home at night and codes and sells his shareware just to give him extra money and to supplement his income. The problem up until now was that programming tools were getting very expensive. For the hobbyist this was too expensive and they cant afford some of the high end programming environments. Luckily the times have changed and companies like Borland and Microsoft have made some very nice tools available for low cost or free. There are Open Source IDE's such as SharpDevelop and numerous others for Java and C++.
Build it yourself
One way to do it is to build it yourself. Download the .NET Framework, the Borland C++ command line tools and Emacs or GVim and you got yourself an extremely usable development environment. For this method you need to know the proper Syntax for whatever programming language you are using. This method is for the extremely geeky and new developers may find this method a little bit intimidating. For those of you that want to learn C# on Linux I strongly suggest Mono. Mono is an open source implementation of the Microsoft .NET Framework. It runs on a wide variety of UNIX and Linux platforms. Packages are available for different flavors of Linux as well as Mac OS X and Win32. You can build Mono for any distribution of Linux and you can build Mono on different UNIX environments such as Solaris, HP/UX and ,God Im going to get flamed for this, UnixWare as well as FreeBSD. Emacs comes standard with Linux and Mac OS X so that is no big deal. Im also going plug XCode right now. XCode is the development environment available for Mac OS X, its also free from Apple Computer. For Mac users I strongly suggest XCode its a very simple tool to learn and you get tons of support from Apple. XCode comes with Interface Builder as well as other tools.
Of all the IDE's out here for C# this is my personal favorite. I find it much less resource intensive than Visual Studios and I enjoy the layout much more. Borland C# Builder comes in two different flavors. There is a Professional version that includes an Architect, Professional and Enterprise edition that starts at $999.00 and there is a free personal edition. For work I use the Professional version because there is a catch to the Personal edition, the personal edition can only be used for non-commercial development which inhibits the developer. You can also export the code from Borlands project files to Visual Studio formats. C#Builder is extremely easy to use and is very intuitive for the new user. If you are interested in developing ASP.NET content C#Builder can also do that. For those of you that can afford it, go with the professional version. If you just want a decent IDE to create Open Source software than the personal edition is equally just as good. C#Builder does require IE 6, the .NET Runtime and the .NET SDK 1.1
The golden boy of Open Source C# IDE's. Very good and very stable, also very cheap to acquire. SharpDevelop is already at RC2 and if RC2 is any vision of whats to come I forsee SharpDevelop becoming an extremely popular package both commercially and personally. RC2 is right now at a usable point. When I first heard about SharpDevelop it was at version 0.7 and at that time it was just a good editor, it has advanced pretty far and it is one of the Open Source projects that I look forward to seeing what happens. SharpDevelops layout is very similar to that of Visual Studios. There are a wide range of options for SharpDevelop, yopu can work on either C# or VB.NET projects. There is also a C++ option where you can create C++ projects. Its not hampered by the same non-commercial only restriction such as C# Builder personal. SharpDevelop wss forked recently and dubbed MonoDevelop. MonoDevelop is the IDE for the Mono project but lacks some features such as Windows Forms design. MonoDevelop is for the Linux platform but has been compiled on Mac OS X and Solaris. SharpDevelop requires the .NET SDK 1.1 but you can also use the Runtime only as that has the VB.NET and C# compilers built in.
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