Try Visual Studio. It's free.

[Geek-9pm]

Microsoft has versions of Visual Studio well suited for a newcomer to programming.
Yes, it is very good and you can learn it with less effort.
Why did I say that? Because there are lots of free tutorials all over the  Internet.
Here is a good, simple starter on You Tube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pduCFX2O30o

He starts out with a console  program. Ring t. A console program in Visual Studio. Don't snicker. It works good.
In one lesson he takes you from "Hello, World" to a little program that does something useful.

Later lessons go on to use more of the power of visual studio.
Also, you can fin tutorials from other sources. Look on you tube for other tutorials about Visual Studio. Most are free.

If you are new to programming, I recommend you look at Visual Studio.

Now here is my question. Do you use Visual Studio on a regular basis?
Why or why not? 

[BC_Programmer]

in 2012 and earlier, Visual Studio effectively had three SKUs. There were some others which fell between some of these but they weren't consistent. You had Express, Professional, and Enterprise.

Express was the free version and had limited functionality in some areas, as well as a few licensing restrictions on what you could do with the software you created with it. It also couldn't load addons.

Professional was effectively the "full" product, with the "full" set of features, and was not encumbered by a TOS or EULA limiting it's use commercially.

Enterprise was the same as Professional, but included a number of tools for things like architectural diagrams, Code maps, memory dump analysis, Greatly expanded Test tools, and so forth.


Now, with the release of Visual Studio 2013, Microsoft completely dumped the "Express" editions.

From 2013 onwards, the Free release is now the "Community" edition. This was more than a name change, as well- the community is largely the same as the professional edition. It has some licensing restrictions, however they are much more lax compared to Express; Smaller Companies can use it without issue, and if the developed product is open source, it has no encumbrances.

Visual Studio Downloads

Now here is my question. Do you use Visual Studio on a regular basis?
Why or why not?

Yes, I have been using Visual Studio since I first set myself to the task of learning C# in 2008, and finally moving away from Visual Basic 6. You can also use it for a few other languages, like VB.NET and F#, and you can install things like IronPython to even develop components using Python. I prefer using a straight up text editor for Python, though. Or, at best, PyCharm.

Supposedly you can even develop with Java using it- but again I think I'd take pretty much any existing Java IDE (Eclipse, Netbeans, etc.) over VS for that. It's just not built for it.

It's got a few nifty features. It can show some nifty information above methods, for example; In this case the project is part of a git repository, so it will show how many authors and commits a particular part of code has, and when the last commit was. If I add or remove code it will even show those changes with a coloured line in the left margin.

Unfortunately my work uses SVN so that integration doesn't show up. I haven't bothered to install one of the many add-ons which purport to add it either.

And of course that's one reason I continue to use VS, because my work now deals with C# and C# projects. using something else would be an uphill battle even if I wanted to!