The IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment and it’s an application that we can use to write Java programs.
In short IDEs are text editor but much smarter!
Note: IDEs usually are built for more than one language and so an IDE that you download for a language like C# might be able to run other languages like C, C++, and JavaScript etc. as well.
You can think of an IDE as your assistant.
For example IDEs are familiar with the syntax of the target language and are capable of finding misspelled keywords or wrong structure. In these cases, IDEs highlight the problem in the program, suggest how to fix them and sometimes they do these types of fixing by themselves.
In many cases, when we’re writing a program, we use boilerplate source codes. So some of the IDEs (those that are move advanced) go even higher and they can guess what code we’re trying to write by seeing a few words of our program and automatically suggest the rest of codes, or if there are dependencies, they’ll automatically import those dependencies (libraries, classes etc.). This helps us to increase the speed of development.
Two of the best IDEs for C# programming:
There are two popular and free IDEs out there that can be used for developing C# programs.
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The first one is Microsoft `Visual Studio`.
You can download the IDE at: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/vs/community/Note: only the community version of this IDE is free. Also throughout this tutorial we will use this IDE.
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The second one that’s also Microsoft free product is `Visual
Studio Code`.
You can download the IDE at: https://code.visualstudio.com/download