There's been a free version of each Visual Studio release for about ten years.

More than that the Community Edition keeps getting more fully featured. To the point where for the average indie developer there isn't that much difference, especially compared to the intro paid edition. Plus with Bizspark you get 3 Ultimate licences.

About as well as Xcode runs on my Windows machine, but there are always VMs.

(I wasn't who downvoted you, BTW)

Well, as a fairly broke student who doesn't own any Windows computers (and who's plenty tired of Java), I've found that getting into C# is unnecessarily unpleasant. It doesn't help that everybody's advice seems to be "get Visual Studio."

I'm sure it's great, and if I put more effort into it I might get something to work. But it is a real barrier: Why should I jump to C# if it isn't actually any more convenient?

As a student, you should look into this program: https://www.dreamspark.com/

There are some great cross-platform developments in the pipeline that should allow you to have a native Linux experience approaching VS the future, but you really should use VS if you want the best experience with C#/.NET today. DreamSpark will give you access to free licenses of Windows and VS (and other Microsoft software), that you can install in a free VM host like VirtualBox, so don't let the perceived costs of using VS deter you.

I can't remember if DreamSpark comes with any Azure credits. If it does come with the $150/mo credit that most MSDN subscriptions do, you can use that to run a Windows/VS VM in Azure and just RDP to that. They have templates prebuilt so you can spin up a new VM with Windows and Visual Studio already installed with one click. That's a great way to get up and running very quickly: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2014/06/04/v...

My email's in my profile here. Feel free to get in touch if I can help with anything.

I will look into that, thanks.

If you want C# for the JVM, take a look at Kotlin: http://kotlin-lang.org/

There's also http://omnisharp.net

Plus you can be locked out of VS if you go away for a weekend and haven't signed into the IDE in a while. Happened to me twice last year. Let me repeat that - they force you to login to their tools (that Ive paid for) and if you don't the IDE is rendered unusable. Fuck the guy in the VS team that OK'ed that feature.

But it was a blessing in disguise really as it made me look into other pastures like Node & Laravel.

This is in reference to the partner version of VS.

This is bs.