Maximum PC

Pardon me for being a bit depressed atm, my hdd just fragged itself. i'm going to order a new one tomorrow, so before I go to bed i wanted to ask for some recommendations. I am at college studying Computer Science. I have mostly been programming Java, and some C. I want to start playing with C++, C#, Perl, and any other random language my teachers decide to assign me that week. And whatever I might need for platform development(my boss has hinted at need a programmer for android, kindle, ipad, ...)

I have to have a windows computer. I have a laptop w/ fedora 13 on it. But it's a bit used. DVD broke, 1 of the HDD Broke, overheats, low battery... you know the tune. I have tried running a virtual box on my old windows machine, and it worked. just really slowly.

I am asking for recommendations for what you use for programming, or what you would do in my situation. I need the ability to write very easy programs (which i'm used to using gvim) to real world level programs. I tried Visual studio and thought it was a bit bulky, but if that's what i should use ill just get used to it. I would love to just buy a new computer for dedicated programming, but considering im going to have to donate blood for a few weeks just to buy my HDD, that's not going to happen.

if you have recommendations for programming on windows, how do i go about installing compilers, editors and stuffs. on linux i just yum install, but i don't think windows is quite like that.

Please and Thank you.

Not to be a downer, but if you want to do anything serious in Windows, Visual Studio is the way to go. Pretty much the only way to do C# (yes, there are things like Sharp Develop, but srsly, screw that).

If you are doing Java, get Eclipse. No substitute will really work for you IMO; especially if you want to do Android stuff. Forget trying to develop for iPod/iPhone/iPad. You'll need a mac and you don't have the cash for that it sounds.

I think you need to narrow down your focus and pick one thing. How much prior experience do you have with programming, and I mean serious programming.

Also, see if your school is eligible for Dreamspark: https://www.dreamspark.com/default.aspx. Free stuff for students.

I should probably list my kit that I use daily for Windows development...

Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 - http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/e ... 0-editions
Resharper - http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/
MS SQL Server 2005 and 2008 - http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/default.aspx
Red Gate SQL Tools - http://www.red-gate.com/
Notepad++ - http://notepad-plus-plus.org/
Windows Installer XML - http://wix.sourceforge.net/

I also have lots of other stuff that isn't programming specific but helps me out daily. 7zip, Ultramon, Launchy, etc...

Thanks for the list and info. I'd prefer not to do iPad programming, so that was definitely not my concern for my personal computer. I'm going to be doing a lot of programming in the next few years so I wanted to make sure to get started on at least a foot, and as close to the right one as possible.

As far as narrowing down my focus, I couldn't agree more. I just thought I'd play around with a few in order to decide. I have no experience with serious, professional programming, only academic and school projects. Unfortunately I didn't start programming until college, so now I'm trying to catch up with all the other geniuses who started in High school.

What you want to do and who you want to work for will make a difference in what you choose. Conversely you could choose a language or platform and then find somebody who will let you work in that.

Learning .NET is going to be a huge benefit for finding jobs.

Yeah, as Crash said, Visual Studio is the premiere tool. Visual Studio 2010 is awesome, probably the best version of Visual Studio ever released.

Stick with C#, if you've worked with Java and C. It's a K&R language, so it should feel familiar syntactically (though paradigms are a bit different).
VB.Net's not bad, but it's wordy and not as terse as C#. Learning 3.5 and 4.0 will benefit you greatly, and stick with .NET, it's going to be MS future platform for development (IMO).

A word about Redgate: if you can afford it, get it. I manage multiple environments (dev, test/staging, demo and production) and Redgate helps me manage my SQL backends like you wouldn't imagine. SQL Compare and SQL Data Generator have been uber-helpful, I cried when I began using it. SQL Compare helps me manage my schemas far more efficiently than scripts alone, and with multiple environments, you wouldn't want to keep juggling script after script.

For iOS development, yes, you'll need a Mac, but if you have web dev experience look into PhoneGap (www.phonegap.com). I'm eval'ing it right now and I like it. It uses jQuery, XHTML and CSS inside XCode and it will compile it into an objective-c executable. One of my main lessons learnt was this: Objective-C is FUGLY. It's like a retarded chimp put it together (and I'm a Mac fanboy, btw).

A lot of the tools Crash listed really help (Notepad++ is the love of my life), and if you can dump the cash for these tools, by all means do so.

RedGate is awesome!

Too bad works wants us to use the VS built in stuff instead. Which doesn't support SQL 2000... which we are still using in some places

SQL 2000 needs to die.

I <3 SQL Server 2008; MERGE makes my life awesome. I'll be the first to admit that I abused MERGE but in the end, I now have one stored proc that does CRUD actions, and I can do bulk transactions by passing in an XML string.

RedGate is one of those lovely tools...it has made my life easier.