Hello all.

I was wondering, what sort of programs do you use to make other programs, if you do.
What sort of programs do you make?
Personally, I use Microsoft visual basic 2010 express as it's free and does what I need.
I've lately gotten into doing beginner tutorials... Does anyone else do it as a hobby?
Or only when needed?

Thanks.

used it last semester in a programming class.

its ok but from what ive heard from others who had more programming experience they liked java better. i had access to the full program so im not sure exactly what gets cut out in the free version though.

Awesome, thanks. I'll have to have a look at that.
Just out of curiosity... What did you use it for in your class?

just little silly programs like making UI for restaurants or car shops. you input or click certain things and its set up to show you prices and taxes and other stuff. it was only a half semester class and we only did the first part of the book so i imagine there is alot more you can do with it. the only thing ive ever done was game modding and making a couple of websites years ago so all this programming stuff is very new to me. its alot more like learning a foreign language then i expected. i was expecting it to be more like formulas and stuff for some reason.

I use premium just now until I can upgrade it, I use it too make websites and windows form I feel like but I'm no that good at complex stuff.
I've made a working Address Book, Calculator that does sqrt and other stuff, a fully functioning website.
As part of my work though I need to use VS2005 and its terribly slow and plain compared to VS2010
I use C# and VB for my programs but I want to pick up XNA aswell

I have Visual Studio 2010 Professional I got from the Dreamspark program. Don't use it for VB coding though, only C#/XNA and I'm trying to learn C++

Don't use VB. Seriously. It's a horribly broken language in so many ways it's not even funny. It'll make you a bad programmer by teaching you a ton of wrong things about how to solve problems.

C# (if you'd like to make some games with XNA) is a good choice for a start, and has a ton of documentation available online too. Try out Unity 3D too if you think about programming games; it has C# (via the Mono project) as one of the "scripting" languages.

Of the other languages available for MS's IDE, I can recommend two: C++ is good for more "serious" programming, but harder to learn properly. F# lets you do functional programming, which is good to know by itself since it leads itself to surprisingly easy solutions to problems which are "hard" in strictly object-oriented languages. You need to use the right tool for the job, but for that you need to know which tools are available first.

I got Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate from the MSDNAA program at my school. I mainly use it for C# for small personal use programs, one is a program to change values in the middle of a huge text file for example. I do know some VB.NET but I prefer not to use it. I really wish I could come up with more ideas and have enough patience to work them out sometimes but I don't have enough time to sit and write anything big anymore.