Many potential C# programmers will be curious about tools and environments (IDEs) for C# programming. Therefore we will, briefly, enumerate the most obvious possibilities. We will mention possibilities in both Windows and Unix.

9.1 C# Tools on Windows 9.2 C# Tools on Unix

 

9.1.  C# Tools on Windows
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Windows is the primary platform of C#. This is due to the fact that C# is a Microsoft language.

Microsoft supplies several different set of tools that support the C# programmer:

.NET Framework SDK 3.5 "Software Development Kit" Command line tools, such as the C# compiler csc Visual C# Express IDE - An Integrated Development Environment A C# specialized, free version of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Visual Studio IDE - An Integrated Development Environment The professional, commercial development environment for C# and other programming languages

The .Net Standard Development Kit (SDK) supports the raw tools, including a traditional C# compiler. Although many programmers today use contemporary IDEs such as Visual Studio or Eclipse, I find it important that all programmers understand the basic and underlying activation of the compiler.

The Visual C# Express edition is a free (gratis) variant of Visual Studio, explicitly targeted at students and other newcomers to C#. There are video resources [cs-video-resources] available for getting started with C# 2008 Express. The experience you get with Visual C# Express can immediately be transferred to Visual studio. The two IDEs are very similar.

Visual Studio is the commercial flagship environment of C# programming. You will have to buy Visual Studio if you want to use it. Notice, however, that many universities have an academic alliance with Microsoft that provides access to Visual Studio and other Microsoft software.

9.2.  C# Tools on Unix
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The MONO project provides tools for C# development on Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, Unix in general, and interesting enough also on Windows. MONO is the choice if you swear to the Linux platform.

Let us summarize the MONO resources, available to the Linux people:

MONO An open source project (sponsored by Novell) Corresponds the the Microsoft SDK Based on ECMA specifications of C# and the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) Virtual Machine Command line tools Compilers: mcs (C# 1.5) and gmcs (C# 2.0) MONO on cs.aau.dk Mono is already installed on the application servers at cs.aau.dk MONO on your own Linux machine You can install MONO yourself if you wish MonoDevelop A GNOME IDE for C#

For good reasons, the MONO CLI is not as updated as the .NET solutions. MONO will most probably always be at least one step behind Microsoft.