Free Development Tools

[This was originally posted at http://timstall.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com/free_development_tools.htm]

A lot of programmers get their start as young hobbyists. However, young hobbyists often don't have the money to buy expensive development tools.

Fortunately, in .Net, you can get most of the core development tools for free.

• Microsoft provides express editions for its platform. They're more limited than the commercial products, but they get you started.

  • An editor for your programming language (like C#) - VS C# Express

  • A backend database engine - SQL Server 2005 Express

  • Environments for web and game development

• Even a hobbyist should still have source control (note that this isn't .Net specific, you could use it to manage any files)

  • A free, open-source, source control system (which is way better than VSS) is Subversion.

    • Command line version - great for automating things

    • GUI front end - good for an easy GUI

  • Even if you are the sole developer, source control still is invaluable:

    • It lets you keep track of all your changes, giving you the confidence to experiment with big changes because you know you can just roll back. This is much better than copying your entire project each time you do something big.

    • It lets you view the entire revision history of your code

• There are tons of free helper-tools, like NUnit for unit tests, FxCop for static code analysis, and more. Scott Hanselman does a great job of summarizing these.

Given that the knowledge is free (via millions of internet tutorials, blogs, and reference guides), and the tools are free, all you need is a computer and motivation, and even the young hobbyist can become a great developer.

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