I talked to lots of programmers at the Computers & Writing conference who were really excited about Microsoft's .net platform. I still don't quite understand all the reasons why, but apparently Microsoft has recently made some changes that make it very easy to develop for it. I believe the program that kept getting mentioned was Microsoft Visual Studio, though I could be mistaken.
When I was trying to learn C/C++ (which I intend to go back to this summer!), I was using a program called BloodDev. It was a lot simpler and easier for me than the Microsoft program, which was about as interface-heavy as Word is for word processing (i.e., GREAT if you know what you're doing, confusing as all hell if you don't).
I talked to lots of programmers at the Computers & Writing conference who were really excited about Microsoft's .net platform. I still don't quite understand all the reasons why, but apparently Microsoft has recently made some changes that make it very easy to develop for it. I believe the program that kept getting mentioned was Microsoft Visual Studio, though I could be mistaken.
When I was trying to learn C/C++ (which I intend to go back to this summer!), I was using a program called BloodDev. It was a lot simpler and easier for me than the Microsoft program, which was about as interface-heavy as Word is for word processing (i.e., GREAT if you know what you're doing, confusing as all hell if you don't).