Free Programming Tools from Microsoft

Amazing huh? They are getting in on the bandwagon of giving away things to get people hooked on their way of coding.

btw. Many people seem to think that you can't distribute or sell applications built with these "Express" versions of the software. Well, I read through the licensing agreements and as far as I can tell "you can sell and distribute applications". There are some restrictions on what code libraries that you can redistribute but this is the same for all the software. Basically, the restrictions seem to be about avoiding any MS code being subject to an open-source licence.

Where they provide sample code, they just ask that you substantially add to the functionality before you sell it on etc.

Disclaimer: Read the EULA's rather than relying on my interpretation.

So far I have tried Visual C++ Express and Visual C# .NET With both of these, I compiled console applications.

C++ is a bit of a pain for me. The code I was porting across generated lots of warnings and had several errors. I ignored most of the warnings but had difficulty solving the errors. They were due to type mismatching between strings. There are now a huge variety of string types in Windows but I used Type Casting to get around the errors.

C# .NET is what I plan to go with next since it get's rid of the annoying pointers and the code looks much more simple and easy to understand. So if you have used a modern Basic, you may wonder why you don't move over to using C# The new programming environment is very nice to use, with helpful Intellisense which tries to help you type the commands, gives lists of what is possible to type next and shows you straight away where you are making typos.

You can build Windows applications, Console apps, DLLs and Screen Savers. I also noticed that they have a Game Development language which can target the XBox and this too is a free download.

If you have never done any programming before, Visual Basic may be a good choice.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/