Visual Studio

Visual Studio serves a wide range of programming-related purposes. This integrated development environment (IDE) from Microsoft can be used to develop Windows-based programs, services, websites, apps and more. Of course, everything you create doesn't have to be tied to the Windows operating system. You can also develop for Android, iOS and Mac. The IDE supports 36 programming languages, including C++, Visual Basic and TypeScript and it provides you with every tool you need to create your products in an efficient manner. Even if you feel that something is lacking, you can add it to the software yourself.

Installing Visual Studio is not as straightforward as with other pieces of software. When you open the main setup package, the wizard will present a wide range of supplementary modules and you can choose which ones to install or not. It takes a few minutes to complete the installation process itself and you'd better make sure you have enough disk space on drive C: and that there aren't other issues to encounter, otherwise the wizard won't tell you why it stopped installing.

On the surface, Visual Studio looks little more than a text editor. It comes with traditional menus and toolbars, but the options themselves allow you to do much more than writing. Before you start working, you may create repositories, manage your projects, organize solutions and more. If you have to work on multiple files, you can have them open at the same time, on separate tabs. Also, if you want to have two or more files on the screen, you can simply drag their tabs out of the interface.

When creating a new file, you can decide to make it a simple text file or an HTML page, a JavaScript file, a Style Sheet, XML schema and so on. If you've installed the bare-bone Visual Studio, without any additional modules, you won't find too many file formats in the list, but you can install many others yourself, without any effort.

The software comes with a wide variety of built-in tools. Besides the code editor itself, whish supports code refactoring and IntelliSense, you can also find an integrated debugger, a code profiler, forms designer and much more. Furthermore, there are many extensions and updates to be found online and you can browse through them on the program's interface. They are listed in several categories and it takes a single click to download and install them.

From basic programs to websites or mobile apps, everything can be done through the powerful functionality that Visual Studio has to offer.